


Rusted Hell

by David375



Category: PlanetSide (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-28 05:38:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 51,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13264845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/David375/pseuds/David375
Summary: In the year 2895, nearly fifty years after the start of the Eternal War, Vanu Sovereignty forces discover, and the Terrans and New Conglomerate steal, relics of the Vanu race that could very well turn the tides of the fifty-year war. When experiments go south, however, six heroes find themselves torn from the war-ravaged home they once knew, with nothing but shaky alliances standing between them and a swift, permanent death. Will they find a way to return the eternal fight they called home?





	1. Preface + Index of Useful Terms

**Author's Note:**

> Preface:
> 
> Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. Before we set off on this “little” journey of ours (I’ve no clue how long it will be, to be frank with you – only some rough plot ideas), I figured I’d best explain myself and provide a little tool for you to use in your travels. A dictionary of sorts, I suppose.
> 
> First off, I’m a college student with a somewhat heavy workload (can’t build gonk droids for drawing dicks on Mars without getting a degree, I guess), and I’m also busy revising a much longer work of mine, titled “Zero no Tsukaima: an Unfamiliar Tale”, so progress on this story could very well be slow until I clear a few things off of my plate. I am certainly committed to bringing this story to a close, whenever that day may be, so let’s hope it’s not TOO far out there.
> 
> Secondly, for those of you who don’t know, Planetside 2 in fact had a rather interesting background written for it by comic book writer Marv Wolfman (praise be), now found on their wiki. Google “Planetside 2 Lore” and you’ll find the article on the game’s wiki that will provide plenty of backstory for what you’ll read here in a neat little package, including a timeline. The story will be building off of this, and while I’ll do my best to weave it into a story so that you could make sense of things without the wiki article, this is only my second fanfiction, so there’s no guarantee I’ll succeed. I highly suggest moseying on over to that wiki page when you get the chance.
> 
> Lastly, I’ll for those of you who aren’t familiar with Planetside 2 and perhaps more obscure military terms used in the story, I’ll be leaving a small glossary here for you to peruse at your own disgression. Any time I use a word that I think might need explanation, I’ll come back and update the glossary below to reflect that.
> 
> Best of luck, soldier!

 

**INDEX OF TERMS:**

Auraxis: Name of the planet that the events of the _Planetside_ video games occur on. A Class M planet (sustaining life of both plants and animals) discovered after half of Earth’s colony ships drift in deep space for three years after passing through a wormhole that appeared at the edge of the Solar System. Half of the colony ships were lost in the wormhole transition (fate unknown, presumed to be destroyed by the wormhole’s gravity well), leaving the other half of the colony ships desperate for resources until they discovered “New Earth”, later christened Auraxis. Has a widely diverse range of climates, ranging from sub-zero tundras to scorching deserts. Was once the home, or at least an outpost, of the alien race known as the Vanu.

 

Amerish: One of the four continents of Auraxis. Largely dominated by grasslands, temperate forests, and mountain ranges. Mild climates, mild weather barring the occasional tornado.

 

Amp Station: common term used to refer to the twelve major power production facilities across the four continents of Auraxis. Generates power on an incredible scale for powering research facilities and battle stations across the continent.

 

APHE: Armor Piercing, High Explosive. A kind of anti-vehicle bullet or shell that contains an explosive filler designed to explode like a grenade after penetrating armor, inflicting lethal wounds to the occupants inside.

Biolab: common term used to refer to the twelve major biological research facilities that span the four continents of Auraxis. Hosts preserved “old-world” flora from Earth as well as development of new cultivars from Auraxis itself.

 

CO: Abbreviation for Commanding Officer. Can indicate anyone of superior rank, but is typically used to refer to the person a soldier most often reports to, such as a squad leader.

 

Esamir: One of the four continents of Auraxis. Completely frozen over almost the entire Auraxian year, and home to bristling mountains and impressive crystalline structures that make almost the entire northern part of the continent impassable to ground vehicles aside from carved roads.

 

Hossin: One of the four continents of Auraxis. Consists almost entirely of swampy terrain and dense old-growth forests, with intermittent plateau ranges and other geologic oddities.

 

Indar: One of the four continents of Auraxis. The northern half of the continent is almost entirely covered with salt flats after the ocean receded due to tectonic shifts raising the continent out of the ocean. The southeast section of the continent consists of deep ravines and rocky outcroppings resulting in lots of vertical combat, while the southwest contains savanna-like plains and sparse foliage.

 

Tech Plant: common term used to refer to the twelve major technology development facilities across the four continents of Auraxis. Used for development of new vehicles, small arms, and larger siege weapons.

 

Vanu: Alien race that once lived on Auraxis. Supposedly the source of the wormhole that brought half of the colony ships to deep space near Auraxis on October 20, 2640, they’ve long since gone extinct, or packed up and shipped off to god knows where, but left behind some remains of their civilization for humans to find in the process. The Vanu Sovereignty got their name after the Sovereignty’s “founder”, Henry Briggs, discovered a Vanu beacon that gave him a vision of the alien race, as well as their name.


	2. Chapter 1

_Esamir – Frostfall Overlook – 0500 hours._

The sound of whistling wind and fresh snow crunching under his boots filled his mind, drowning out the ever-present sounds of war in the distance – the staccato booms of Liberator gunships’ belly cannons, the unnerving, unearthly whine of plasma particles flying every which direction, even the occasional chaingun that sounded like some god above had let rip the most lethal fart known to mankind. None of that mattered at this moment, though. Locking down the continent of Indar, half a world away, was more of a pressing matter to the generals of the Vanu Sovereignty. And because of it, the few meagerly-equipped rearguards who had been left to defend Ymir biological laboratories, also known as the Ymir Biolab, were being crushed by an onslaught of Terran Republic forces, eager to seize the sprawling dome-shaped laboratory in hopes of catching Vanu scientists unaware, perhaps even gain some of their valuable data.

And it was his job to stop them. It always was, even when he was a part of them.

He was Edward Saller, now laying in the snow on the high cliff-like snowy mountains that bordered either side of the Biolab’s major northern road. He had been many things – a scientist, an engineer, a soldier. Who he had fought for didn’t matter to him, so long as they funded his research. Among the wealth of designs with his name on them included the Reconstruction Tubes, an incredible advancement in human technology that effectively granted indefinite life, so long as you weren’t afraid to die. It was also the design he hated the most. It was the design solely responsible for this war that had stretched on and on for fifty years, at least the way he saw it. He was one of the original Terran Republic military scientists who had traveled through the wormhole at the edge of the solar system on October 20, 2640. The amazement that that fateful day was almost two hundred and fifty five years in the past had lost its sense of wonder after countless sleepless nights.

Preoccupied with his thoughts, he had failed to notice that the distant sounds of war had died away. The sound of engines grew closer and closer as the Terran Republic, their armor likely still dripping with lukewarm blood of his Vanu brothers, marched onward to their objective. With any luck, however, they would never reach it.

He glanced down at his rifle scope one last time, dialing in the zeroing with practiced haste. It was critical that the weapon be as precise as he was for this test. He much would have preferred that one of the more skilled Vanu marksmen had taken the job, but for all the technical and scientific minds that graced the Vanu Sovereignty, few knew how to write a technical essay that didn’t leave its readers wondering if the author even knew how to write. And so, here he was, conducting yet another trial on this new weapons platform. One of the few benefits of working with the more rigid, report-heavy Terran command tree, he supposed. The other, he grimly thought, was the vital knowledge of Terran vehicles and tactics drilled into him that would give him the upper edge in a minute or two.

As the trail of red and grey vehicles rolled into the valley below, he laid his heavy anti-materiel rifle in the snow and began hastily shoveling the white powder up onto the grey barrel, hoping to obscure the dark colored bar of metal against the glistening landscape around him. Pressing his cheek against the stock of the lengthy rifle, he peered into his scope, taking aim at his first target.

With a slow, measured squeeze of the trigger, the massive rifle roared, sending one of his custom-tooled twenty-five millimeter APHE rounds ripping through the air. Almost instantly, the round impacted the armored roof of the six-wheeled Sunderer troop transport bus, slicing clean through the plate armor like a hot knife through butter. He didn’t have to imagine the horrific results it inflicted on the driver as the vehicle veered to the left of the road, picking up speed as the mangled body rested on the gas pedal. The Sunderer tried to climb the hill, only to come tumbling down as it rolled on its side, sliding to a stop in the center of the road on its side -- just the kind of roadblock he'd hoped for.

With the rest of the armor column now on high alert, a burst of gut-wrenching fear all too familiar to him filled his body, but he resisted the urge to run, instead watching through his rifle scope as soldiers kicked the back doors of the disabled Sunderer open and began to pile out. “They haven’t seen me yet. Should have stayed behind their armor and used their radios to contact a tank gunner to spot me from safety. What a bunch of idiots…” he muttered to himself as he racked the rifle’s bolt, chambering a new cartridge. He slowly shifted the rifle to the next target, a heavy double-barreled tank known by its production name, the Prowler. While most Vanu Sovereignty soldiers thought it took nothing short of several pounds of demolition charges or serious air support to eliminate the heavily-armored Prowler, with just the right knowledge…

Another trigger pull, another rifle report echoing across the valley. With a brief spark of impact, the heavy bullet punched through the swiveling baseplate of the remote-controlled machine gun on top of the heavy tank’s turret. He could almost imagine the cartridge’s effects: piercing through the relatively-unarmored turret mount, the explosive charge the round carried would have detonated just inside the turret – likely only inches from the soldier operating the machine gun via computer screen, peppering him with molten shards of metal. If for some reason he were absent, shrapnel would spread out and take its toll on the surrounding crew as the fragments ricocheted around the cramped quarters. What he hadn’t expected, however, was for flames to come spewing out of the tank’s large gun barrels like a serpent’s tongue, followed by a percussive explosion that sent the turret flying off its chassis like debris from a volcano. “Must’ve hit ammo,” he thought, his helmet visor automatically tinting itself in reaction to the bright light. “I thought they taught those idiots not to store loose ammo outside the storage boxes.” Then again, he knew, no one listened to EVERY order handed down to them. Adaptability and thinking for yourself was a handy tool for staying alive and climbing the ranks -- that is, if it didn’t get you blown up in spectacular fashion.

He could hear the cries of the overturned Sunderer’s soldiers as they raised their rifles, firing blindly into the hills above them in hopes of scaring the sniper into moving. It was only a matter of time, he knew, until one of them managed to spot him. He slowly began to crawl backward toward cover, praying to an unnamed god that they didn’t see him. As easy as it was to have a new body built for him in the Reconstruction Tubes and have his memories downloaded as they had a million times, nothing could stop the pain of a slow death. Like any soldier, that was something he was eager to avoid.

Suddenly, a wavering hum sounded out behind him. Rolling over, he found himself face to face with a red and grey suited Infiltrator, a glistening knife in his hands. As the assassin dove down toward him with the knife, he quickly rolled to his right, reaching for his sidearm strapped to his leg. The NS-61 Emissary submachine gun in his hand clattered away, peppering the would-be assassin with round after round until he dropped.

By now, every TR soldier below knew exactly where he was, readily unloading every bullet they owned in his general direction. Gritting his teeth, he shoved his little auto-pistol back in its holster and snatched his rifle by the buttstock, hauling as hard as he could to pull the snow-covered rifle to safety. Warnings chirped in his helmet’s headset to indicate that his armor’s shield generator had just gone down from a few grazing bullet impacts, but he didn’t dare let go of the rifle until he had made it behind a rock for cover. Bullets were whizzing around the small boulder, keeping him from peeking over to see whether his opponents were advancing on his position.

“These fuckers need to know when to give up!” He muttered through gritted teeth as he set the heavy rifle down, drawing his sidearm. Dropping the old magazine and slapping in a new one, he pocketed the submachine gun once more and picked up the empty magazine he had dropped. “No sense in keeping you!” He thought, jokingly lobbing it over the rock in hopes of hitting someone in the head. The cries of soldiers diving for cover spurred him into a fit of laughter, thinking that he’d just tossed a hand grenade instead. Picking up his rifle, he sprinted for the next rock, and then the next, scrambling up the hillside until he had crested the ridge. As an afterthought, he found the nearest flat-topped boulder and dusted the freshest layer of snow aside, setting down a small metal plate-like device just under a foot in diameter. Pressing a button on the top with his thumb, the device sprung into life, hastily assembling an automated turret before his very eyes. “That should do it,” he thought, turning to sprint down the hill.

“Call sign Moses, status report!” A gruff voice rang out from the speaker in his helmet. “Looks like a total shitshow on the satellite cam. What the hell did you do?”

Tucking his heavy rifle under his right arm, he pressed a button on the left side of his helmet to accept the incoming call as he jogged. “Just the usual business. The tide was high, the red sea needed a little parting up the ass. Nothing new. You got a ride for me?”

“Hell, let me take a look at the script for that show you just put on and I’ll be stocking the Valkyrie with a hotbox full of your favorite pizza. Ride’s already on the way, ETA three minutes.”

“I can live with that. See you at home,” Edward replied. Taking a deep breath, he attached the heavy rifle tightly to its magnetic sling on his back and began the trek up the next ridge, praying every second that he would have just one more before the enemy crested the ridge behind him. Just as he reached the top, he could hear the digital chirp and subsequent * pop pop pop * of the auto-turret he had left behind, but he didn’t dare stop to watch the device’s handiwork. As soon as he had crested the next ridge, he reached into his armor-plated tool pouch and retrieved a metal cylinder no larger than a pepper mill, dropping to his knees to flick the device on and plant it deep into the snow. With another digital chirp, the device burst into life, shooting a beam of purple-illuminated nanites high into the air. It was a special little ruse of his; the device was normally a signal beacon that provided a lock-on point for orbital paratrooper drops, something that would fill even the most hardened soldiers with the worry that hundreds of infantry could be dropping out of space on their very position. This one, however, was tinkered with, its light wave frequency altered so that the orbital cameras wouldn’t recognize it, but still retain its visible look. Not only would it provide a marker for the exfil pilot, but hopefully slow down a brash, unplanned assault as well. Or so he hoped.

Removing the heavy rifle from its sling on his back, Edward peeked up over the ridge and began looking for his first target. Several light infantry were scaling the hill with ease, the roar of their jetpacks growing closer and closer. He took aim at the closest target, filling the view of his mid-power scope, but not for long. With a roar, the rifle bucked hard against his shoulder, almost sending him tumbling down the hill. The massive round ripped into the approaching light infantry’s stomach, nearly snapping him in half as it continued down the hill and buried itself in the snow. He quickly rechambered a fresh round and tried to acquire a new target, but it was too late.

The next light assault trooper crested the hill, rifle at the ready as he dropped to the ground in front of Edward. He fired the hefty rifle from the hip, nearly dropping it under the hefty recoil, but the round only clipped the young man’s leg. Before the man could fire his carbine, he tossed the anti-materiel rifle at his opponent to knock him down and hastily drew his backup gun once more, dumping half of the magazine in his direction. One of the rounds managed to catch the fallen soldier in the jaw, spraying red all over the snow where he lay. He stowed his submachine gun and dashed for his rifle, scooping it up.

Just as the next jetpack-riding Terran soldier crested the hill, a stream of high-caliber tracers cut him down. By the whine of the approaching vehicle, he knew exactly who it was, not bothering to greet his favorite Valkrie operators as the flying craft approached, its gun still pointed toward the ridgeline. “Don’t get too close, now, there’s still half an armor column over there that’s pretty damn pissed right about now,” he said, holding the mic button on his helmet.

“You implyin’ we aren’t good enough, Ed?” The pilot replied as he pulled the vehicle to a hover just above the ground. Edward picked up his beacon and hopped up onto the dropseat, feeling the electromagnets built into the hotseat latch onto his purple-tinted armor.

“No, I’m saying I need breakfast, a shot of espresso, and my computer before I can write this report up for Command, and you know how much my fans love my writing. So get us the hell out of here, first.”

“You got it, boss. You heard what’s going down over on Indar today? They just put the Lancer into action two days ago, and the fatties are eating it up!”

The “fatties”, he knew, were the 82nd Heavy Infantry battalion. The king tank-busters. Mostly Ex-Terran soldiers who defected to the Vanu so they could play with the latest, greatest tech to feed their destructive appetites. Probably contained almost all of the truly combat-experienced soldiers the Sovereignty had. If anything impressed them, it became the gold standard for everyone else. More importantly, though, he was jealous that they weren’t stuck in this freezing hellhole, being a superhero without the superhero recognition. “Yeah, yeah, just get us home. Brief me about it later.”


	3. Chapter 2

_Vanu Orbital Headquarters – 1017 hours_

Edward took a seat at his desk, finally stripped of his purple nanoweave armor suit in favor of his civilian clothes. Before him on his desk sat the weapons he had used on his mission earlier that morning, accompanied by his third cup of synthetic coffee and a small laptop encased in a bulletproof shell he normally used for his field work. Gulping down half of the lukewarm brew, he snapped the laptop out of its protective case and pulled open a drawer, plugging the laptop into an array of cables mounted to the back of the drawer. On the screen of the laptop, a window briefly popped up, displaying a live feed from the camera mounted to the top of the screen. "Eh, this should do for the presentation," he thought as he leaned up toward the camera, using its live feed on screen like a mirror to properly fix his sloppily-adjusted tie and straighten out the collar of his lab coat and dress shirt. Leaning in, he held still as best he could while the camera scanned his face. When the camera finally recognized his face, the window disappeared.

Suddenly, a large overhead projector flickered into life, casting his laptop’s home screen onto the far wall of the room. He looked up at the projected image, admiring the peaceful serenity the photo of Indar’s grassy fields and geological formations portrayed. When he wasn’t busy violently dismembering people “in the name of Vanu” or for the sake of “science” out in the field, he liked to take photographs. “Something to show the future generations what life was like before we fucked it up and handed it to them on a shit-smeared silver platter,” he thought, withdrawing two gloves from the laptop’s drawer before closing the laptop and pushing it shut. A laser-projected keyboard appeared on his desk, ready to receive inputs from the bulky, ancient-looking motion-tracking gloves he donned.

He had hardly managed to log in when someone knocked at his door. “Come in,” he replied, not bothering to look up as he navigated to the document he had been working on last week. The door opened, casting light into the relatively dim, windowless office.

“Hey, Ed, the Council wanted me to remind you that they’d like to talk to you about your last mission. Post-ops report, you know the drill,” the man said. “By the way, don’t forget you still owe me a round at the bar for that super-hot exfil last week. I’d like to cash in on that later this evening, if you’ve got the time,” the man said, leaning against the door as he cradled a cigarette between his fingers, observing the slowly burning end.

Edward turned to face his friend, Felix Rolando. The man stood at six foot flat, with a jawline that could cut glass and a matting of thick, scraggly brown hair on his head that matched his eyes and stubby facial hair. He looked, and smelled, like he had taken a shower in whatever fluids had leaked out of his Valkyrie, his pride and joy, but he reveled in the stuff much to others’ disgust. Felix was one of the few people he truly enjoyed spending time with, whether it was getting shit-faced at the bar or slinging lead from the hotseat of his flying, pint-sized gunship. To his friend’s dismay, though, he nodded to a clock that read two separate times; 10:21 AM, and 1 hour, 15 minutes. “I’ve hardly been punched in long enough for triple S, so I’ll give you a call later this evening if this meeting goes smoothly. Just don’t go french-kissing their anti-air, because you won’t find a beer with your name on it at the Tubes this time.” Triple S, a term they jokingly shared, stood for “Shit, Shower and a Shave”.

Felix squinted at the seated scientist, or more specifically, at the man's hands. "You still use those old turds? You know we switched over to hologram screens and gloveless laser keyboards, like, forty years ago, right? I'm surprised those things still work."

"Yeah, well..." Edward said, shrugging. "Just a holdover of the old days, y'know. Just feels right." He had always refused to tell his friend that it was one of the few things he still had from his Terran Republic days, along with a few other trinkets stashed around the room. The space station's security squad would be all over his ass in a heartbeat if they realized he had smuggled old Terran hardware on board, no matter how old or spy-equipment-free he could prove it to be.

Felix nodded, jamming the cigarette back in his mouth. “Right, whatever... I’ll see you later. I’ll tell Cecilia you said hi.” With that, his friend disappeared into the hallway, shutting the door behind him with a muted click.

Turning back to his desk, he idly typed away at the document between sips of his coffee, detailing the events of that morning – the handling of the rifle, the effects on its target, the tactics employed by the Terran soldiers, everything. Ever since the Council had found out what a gem of a technical writer they had stumbled upon, they had become a stickler for detail, sometimes at the expense of the purpose of the paper. “I doubt a single person on this damn station will ever lay eyes on the actual paper as a whole”, he thought, downing the last of his bitter drink along with his thoughts. From experience, he also knew the paper would be broken down by a series of computer algorithms by subject. The end product would read like trash, he felt like, but he knew that was just his mind conflicting with the muscle memory of how Terran Republic generals had wanted their papers written so many years ago, so he set aside his gripes and worked as best he could to produce what the Vanu bigwigs wanted.

What seemed like an eon later, Edward decided to call it quits. “That should do it for now,” he thought, hitting the save button on the document several times in succession for no real reason other than bad habit. He pulled off his gloves and stood up, tossing them onto his desk as he headed for the door, off to see the Council.

* * *

 

“Interesting,” one of the Council members said, thinking over what Edward had reported. “You say you took down a Prowler in a single shot?”

“As I said, it was a fluke, sir,” Edward replied. “At such an elevated position, I was able to take advantage of a weak point too small for previous weapons to utilize, but that the tank exploded indicates that the tank crew were not following proper ammunition storage procedures.”

“I see,” the elderly man replied. Of the eleven men seated before Edward, this one whom he knew as Anuj Narayana was the only one with a body over the age of fifty, it seemed, although Edward knew they were all likely his peers in terms of knowledge, if not true age. “So it was a fluke. But what about this Sunderer you engaged? Certainly, that would be considered a reasonable scenario of engagement for this kind of weapon?’

Edward nodded, shrugging slightly. “Perhaps the weapon might face reduced angles at which it can successfully penetrate if the enemy were to utilize blockade armor upgrades, and the spaced armor would limit post-penetration effects… but I see no reason why the round wouldn’t otherwise crack the engine block or similarly disable the vehicle.” The borderline-legalese way he had to speak with the Council members drove him nuts. A voice in the back of his mind desperately pleaded to shout out “It’ll make a big fucking hole in anything short of a Lightning, so shut up already!”

“I still believe this Nanite Systems project to be a waste of time and resources,” another Council member said, rudely resting his face on one hand. “The Lancer project has proven a resounding success. Why even waste our time on primitive kinetic-energy weapons when the Sovereignty already has the production capacity for superior accelerated-plasma technology!”

“Hush now, General Dragoslav,” the elderly man said, gesturing to Edward. “Let us hear his recommendations. Then, you may discuss it amongst your peers for adoption. It was you who brought this to our attention, after all.”

“Right,” Edward said. “It’s hefty, but it’s certainly lighter than any rocket launcher. It would be a suitable support-role weapon for an Engineer carrying more individual pieces of gear than a Heavy Assault soldier. As I understand it, Field Engineers currently lack much in the way of truly portable anti-vehicle options?” He knew other options such as deployable anti-tank missile launchers existed for Engineers, but no one ever had anything good to say about them. Like nearly everything else in combat, getting on one of those was an invitation to have your brain blown out by anything that so much as sneezed in your general direction. Using one, you weren’t just a sitting duck. More like a quadriplegic duck sitting on a box of dynamite at a gun range.

“Yes, well, that’s where the Heavy Assault platoons come in,” General Dragoslav said.

One of the other eleven Council members slammed his fist against the giant half-circle desk. “Give it a break, Dragoslav! You and I both know your prized 82nd can’t cover everything! As Saller’s report said, the Terran Republic pushed in on Ymir Bio Lab faster than usual. We barely had enough time to upload the lab data and evacuate the scientists, and that was AFTER Saller slowed their assault! So unless you’re willing to split up the 82nd into separate regiments and spread them out, we’ll keep-”

“Enough!” Dragoslav yelled. “You’ve been nagging on me for months to break up the 82nd! Do you think I haven’t thought of that? If we break them up, they’ll simply be overwhelmed and crushed piece by piece. If we keep them together to focus on the largest targets, then we can hold critical assets. We just need to train more men!”

At this point, the argument began to spread to the other members, engulfing the room in a cacophony of heated yelling. Edward helplessly looked around as heated words flew, until finally the elderly Council member looked his way and waved toward the door with a smile, mouthing “You’re dismissed.” As hastily as he dared, he beat a retreat to the door and slipped out into the hallway, letting out a pent-up sigh of relief. “I don’t know how we get anything done when those old codgers break down into a pissing match over every little thing,” he thought, strolling through the halls toward his office once more.

He felt something buzz in his lab coat pocket. Pulling up the sleek purple phone with the Vanu three-pronged logo on the back, he opened up the email app. Sure enough, a new email was waiting for him, sent by the Council members he had just left behind. “Probably Anuj wrote the message in advance so he wouldn’t interrupt their inevitable verbal circlejerk,” he thought. “Wish he would just send this shit in advance and spare me the trouble.”

At the top of the message was a twelve-digit code beginning in VS-4, his personnel ID code unique to him alone that immediately caught his attention – only important emails had that. VS-4 codes were rare, only a single clearance grade below the council themselves, and almost nobody knew someone with one, or ever talked about it if they did. Glancing around the hallway to make sure he was alone, he stopped and took a seat against the cold metal walls and began to read.

 

**_HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL: VS-4 Clearance only_ **

**_VS-4UE1317KG6_ **

_To VS-4UE1317KG6,_

_There were more topics to discuss today, but you know how General Dragoslav can be. I thoroughly expect him to keep the rest of this meeting derailed about his favorite little toys like a child seeking attention, so I will spare you another meeting by detailing things here._

_In a previous meeting some months ago, we had discussed among ourselves to close down projects at your clearance level to reallocate engineers to the Holy Spear project..._

"Let's see... that would have been the Lancer project, the anti-tank plasma launcher Dragoslav was pushing so hard in recent months. That should be finishing up development, soon..." Edward thought. Looking around the hallway once more, he turned his eyes back to the rest of the email.

... _While the facilities have been successfully cleared, much of the paperwork and data remains on the closed-network server we review each month. At the request of the Council, we require you to search through the remaining paperwork to choose which documents require preservation, and which to delete. Please postpone further work on the Aldebaran project_ _and report to Lab 67C to ensure the hasty completion of this task._

_Should any questions arise, you have my personal cell phone._

_VS-5UD4825HY9_

“Damn it, Nuj,” he thought, rolling his eyes as he jammed the phone back in his lab coat pocket and stood up, "I really wanted to finish that damn report today". Document management, as mundane as it sounded, was probably more risky than any battlefield for a member of the Vanu Sovereignty, he knew. They were tight-pressed for data storage after saving every scrap of testing data, like a slob hoarding garbage in the unused rooms of his house, but that only served as a testament to just how far the Vanu Sovereignty was ahead of the Terran Republic, or god forbid, the New Conglomerate; almost any piece of test data stored on the station could be turned against them at this stage in the game, in the wrong hands. While it was true that advanced algorithms were commonly used in the lower clearance files to decide what should be sent to the archives down on the planet's surface, where destruction or theft were a possibility, there was no way in hell that the Council would let an algorithm work on files at VS-3 clearance and above. One glitch or hiccup in the system, one single virus to modify the code, and the Sovereignty's most advanced work would be on the front page of every dossier the enemy had on the Sovereignty, and the head of the man responsible for the breach on the chopping block. Even for a skilled eye like his, it was still a solid 60% guesswork, because you just never knew just what document the Council might call for, and for files at his clearance level, the kind that could define an enemy spy's entire career? They could very well put him on the firing line for suspected treason.

Then again, if there was anyone they trusted with these documents, it was him or one of the few other engineers with VS-4 clearance. It was a roll of the dice that had just happened to pick him. With a scowl on his face, he headed off for the laboratory quadrant of the space station.

* * *

 

Laboratory 67C was completely abandoned, per usual. To be accurate, it wasn’t much of a lab any more: It was a specially cordoned-off room that had once been an active laboratory, but was now where the master servers that stored documents with VS-3 clearance and above were installed. Although it held documents of lower clearance, only VS-4’s and the Council could get into the physical room itself as a safety protocol, to keep dangerously curious VS-3’s from prying into documents they shouldn’t. Some of his VS-4 colleagues’ careers, in fact, revolved around this room alone, maintaining the physical servers in peak condition as well as the advanced protection devices built into the room. Tuning automated sentries, checking the wiring of the electromagnetic pulse protection system, ironing out the endless loopholes in the digital security. The Council had even debated rebuilding an entirely new server room on a spring suspension system to protect the servers from physical shock if the space station had ever been struck by a large object, say, an asteroid or an anti-satellite missile. A man could dedicate his life to that kind of work and still never be done.

As usual, the room was absolutely frigid, as most server rooms were, spurring Edward to draw his lab coat tighter about him. He sat down at one of the computers at a desk in the center of the room, punching in his VS-4 code and a password on the physical keyboard. “I forgot any machines on the station still had these,” he thought, listening as the clacking of the keyboard drowned out the near-silent hum of the servers surrounding him. Once the machine had logged him in, he immediately navigated through the network of folders to a folder labeled “Closed-Unarchived”. This folder would contain all of the paperwork from projects that had been terminated, but hadn’t been declassified for storage in the Vanu Archives back on the planet, on the southern half of the continent of Indar.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he thought as he opened up the folder, punching in his clearance ID and password into a popup window one more time before the contents of the folder revealed themselves. Six named folders appeared, each likely containing several papers and possibly hundreds of schematics for projects that had gotten as far as the prototyping stage. Projects Artemis, Goliath, and Betelgeuse were all familiar to him from his own hand in the work, the former two relating to up-arming and up-armoring the Sovereignty’s equivalent to the Prowler tank, the Magrider. The latter was a new attempt at designing a light machine gun for the 82nd Heavy Infantry that utilized what was essentially micro-sized nuclear generators as magazines. While the design had worked rather well, providing effectively bottomless magazines for soldiers with good trigger discipline, that wasn’t exactly the defining trait of the 82nd. And so, they complained about overheating enough to have the project scrapped.

To his surprise, Project Aldebaran, his most recent assignment with that anti-materiel rifle and pocket submachine gun, was also in the folder of closed projects, alongside another relatively successful project he had worked on a month ago that went by the name of Phaseshift. Accessing the folder properties, he found that VS-5UE4545KD2 had authorized the closure of Aldebaran that morning, and Phaseshift only a few days ago. “That has to be Dragoslav, that dirty cunt. How about I drag him kicking and screaming out in front of a TR armor column and let HIM fight for his life just to tell him the project’s closed…”

Suddenly, a thought crossed his mind that put a devilish grin on his face. “You gave me authorization to delete it, how about authorization to un-delete it?” he thought, opening up a new file browser to navigate to the proper active-projects folder. “A little smudging of the lab room assignment, and he won’t find it ‘till I’m long done with the project and pushed it into service. Maybe old man Narayana could help keep Dragoslav busy until I’m done.” He dragged the two project files from one folder to the other before opening up the project file to find the ancillary documents – information he knew would state which laboratory was hosting the projects, who was working on it, when they were scheduled to be completed, et cetera. Deleting the old assignments, he punched in his personal lab code and typed in his VS-4 ID as well as the VS-3 ID’s of his trusted crew, including Felix and the gunner of his Valkyrie, Cecilia Monaghan. That would give him more than enough crew to work with for getting the projects completed before Dragoslav could make a stink about it to the Council.

“That should slim down on how much crap I need to read,” he thought. Closing the folders of the newly-reappointed projects, he turned his attention to the final project on the list: Project Shadow. He couldn’t help but frown as he wracked his mind for any memory of the project, but none came. “I can’t even remember anyone talking about this by name…” he thought. “Maybe it’s that rumor about the new wave of armor implants due to release soon. But that was recently demoted down to VS-2 clearance after a confirmed intel leak, so that wouldn’t even be here any more…” He opened up the project folder, surprised to find it totally empty of technical documents. Only the ancillary document remained. He clicked on that to open it, not surprised to find it corrupted and unusable, according to the machine. “We’ll see about that, you stupid brick,” he thought, opening the file with a basic text editor. Through the wall of symbols, fragments of text remained, most interestingly a few fragmented VS-4 and VS-5 IDs, and the name Lab 69D.  One of the VS-4 ID’s looked suspiciously like his, aside from several digits replaced by strings of incoherent symbols from the corruption.

“Why the hell would I be assigned to a project and not even get a notification for it?” he muttered, double-checking the lab code as though it were a glitch in the computer. Aside from Specialized Containment Units numbered 1 through 19, all labs in the 20 through 80 range were designed with three rooms labeled A, B, and C, and a central, shared testing space. In theory, it was to promote cooperation between scientists of different projects when you could go ask for help from guys at your clearance level just across the hall, or watch your friends work on different projects for inspiration. So, to find a lab room labeled D within that range struck him as odd. “Maybe the central testing room is labeled D? I can’t remember anyone ever calling it that,” he thought. “Maybe it’s a new thing. I bet the project never even got off the ground, so there’s nothing to read. Couldn’t hurt to check, though.” Checking the lab number one last time, he logged out of the machine and hopped up from his desk, eager to get out of the chilly room. He quietly slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind him, and took off down the hall at a jogging pace.

Passing through the occasional groups of engineers chatting in the hallway, Edward hiked around the station’s outer belt of laboratories, arriving at Lab 69 within just a few minutes. Holding up his key card he kept clipped to his jacket, he slipped it into the slot in the card-reader by the door. With a muted electronic chirp, the small touchscreen panel prompted him with a request for a password. Punching in his password, however, caused the panel to flash red, signaling that the passcode was incorrect.

“Huh… Maybe one of the Council members set a custom password on this one,” he thought. “Maybe if I give Anuj a call, he could get me the passcode…” On one hand, he knew that was a bad idea. Projects were canceled for a reason. The job they handed him only entailed filing away the papers he was given, not to go digging for things already deleted, if they even existed. Anuj Narayana was his long-time defender in the Council, but he was first and foremost a Council member, so he would likely report him if this was as serious as he thought it could be. And if the Council caught him snooping around on projects that weren’t meant to see the light of day, he could find himself in some seriously deep shit faster than he could even respond. On the other hand, though, was the burning curiosity of a scientist, the determination of a soldier, and the know-how of an engineer.

He began running the possibilities through his head. One option would be to hit up the armory. He had contacts, good friends there that could likely smuggle out an EMP grenade or two, which would easily disable the electronic door lock. That only left the mechanical lock, which would require some homemade tools to get into if he didn’t want to cut through the lock with a power saw. Not really an option for a public space, where anyone in the surrounding labs would likely hear him. That also assumes they didn’t install a special EMP-proof variant of the electronic lock used for the high-security labs, which visually looks no different than the normal ones, so that option didn’t appeal to him. The second option would be to dig through the archives for details on the computer chip inside. No matter how insulated electronics were, they always emitted a frequency that could be picked up and read, if you could filter out the excess noise. If he knew more about the computer inside that stored the password, he could likely modify his key card with a small chip and receiver that, when inserted into the depths of the machine, could pick up a sample of the noise and try to read it for the binary code that leaked out as electronic noise. Or, he could build a probe on his card that could jack some connections on the chip itself to read what it was doing…

…or maybe it was as simple as trying a few educated passwords. The project code-name, Shadow, he figured, was as good a place as any to start. The question is, what kind of encryption would they use? The Sovereignty engineers, they’re a bright bunch. The cult formed from the smartest engineers and scientists who wanted to escape Terran rule, so it was a given fact that the IQ of the average Vanu soldier stood head and shoulders above his peers in the TR, perhaps an entire body over the New Conglomerate pinheads. It either has to be something so incredibly difficult that they couldn’t figure it out without serious concerted effort, which could be detected and broken up, or something so inconceivably stupid that they would naturally overly-complicate the solution and never get it.

He tried shifting the letters of “Shadow” to their numerical value in the alphabet, only to get a red screen. Adding zeros in front of any single digit number, still a red screen. Even an attempt at shifting the letters in his credentials ID to their numerical value in both forms resulted in flashing red screens.

Frustrated, Edward pulled his phone out of his pocket. He opened up the message Anuj Narayana had sent him, wondering if there were any clues. “One of those VS-5 credentials, they could have been him…” he thought, scanning the message. As he finished the message, his eyes came to rest on Narayana’s closing phrase and ID number. Looking it over, an off-topic thought hit him. “The number I have for Nuj isn’t a private line, it’s the Council receptionist for non-combat phone calls, so why the hell would he say I have his private number? unless… excluding the VS at the beginning, our ID’s are the exact length of an old-school phone number, if you used the old keypad lettering to exchange the letters for numbers.”

Then, the thought hit him. He pocketed his phone and began typing, resulting in the number 742369; “Shadow”, translated in keypad lettering. With a muted chirp, the screen flashed green, and the locks undid themselves with a series of clicks that allowed the two halves of the door to slide apart. “Go fucking figure,” he thought as he withdrew his key card and stepped into the room, expecting the lights to come on by themselves as they did in all other labs. Even after a few seconds, however, they had yet to flicker into life. As the doors slid shut, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone once more, using the screen to find the light switch on the inside of the door frame. The lights flickered on, bathing the room in light.

The room before him was a mess. Only the rack of weapons in the far corner of the room stood organized; the rest of the room was coated in blank scraps of paper, like someone had dumped several reams of the stuff into a wood chipper. On the desk in the center of the room sat a single desktop computer, surrounded by neat stacks of books and written papers, but what most worried him was what looked like blood hardened onto the backrest of the white swivel chair tucked into the desk. He quietly crept into the room, his hair all over his body standing on end all the way to the computer. The computer was still logged into someone’s account, with a document displayed on the screen.

Scrolling to the top of the document, he began to read. The further he read, the farther down his heart sank into his stomach. In disbelief, he stood up and stepped over to the west-side room, what would have been labeled 69A.

Sure enough, bodies. Many, many bodies.

Edward had to hold his mouth to keep from puking at the gut-wrenching smell of corpses starting to decay. He forced himself into the room, looking over the faces and the names. Another wave of vomiting came forth, this time too strong to hold back. He stepped over to the garbage can by the door and unloaded his stomach before forcing himself to return, pulling the bodies aside one by one. Soon, he found exactly what he was looking for: himself.

“No fucking way,” he said, his hands clammy and trembling as he pulled up the ID card hanging from the corpse’s jacket. Number for number, it matched his own. Even the photo, down to the most minute detail. “Sweet holy god, the bastards did it. WE did it.”

Edward stepped out of the room, sliding down to the ground against the closed door as he thought things over. What they did, he knew, was synthetic memory editing. After the project was terminated, he had been shot, and his memories altered before being rebuilt in the Reconstruction Tubes. Wiping memories was only one half of the equation, by far the easier of the two. The other half? Over in 69B, according to the report on the computer he had read. The document had said that they had taken DNA from several soldiers and engineers to create an ideal body. High IQ capacity, physically well-built bodies for combat, the works. Nothing too special, he knew. That was just one of the options his Reconstruction Tubes provided, if you weren’t choosing to re-use an existing set of DNA. The purpose of the project, what they had finally cracked, was the ability to successfully synthesize memories and implant it into a brain in a way that it could make sense of. It allowed someone to take perfect training, combat experience, and combine it with a cut-and-paste body that could be readily prepared as a truly disposable soldier.

The issue, though, was that the process wasn’t perfect. The project was written as “close to failure” because they couldn’t produce a series of memories that were permanent – they never made it to long-term memory. As they lost their memories, the test subjects were devolving to babies in an adult body, or worse, somewhere in between, like violent cavemen. There were duplicates of some bodies in the room, further along in decomposing than the rest. Failures that had to be put down, no doubt.

Edward forced himself to his feet. He needed to get photos, upload everything to the master server in 67C, especially the documents on the computer, and get this archived. Pulling up his phone, he raised the device and used its built-in camera to take a photo of the corpses in 69A. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he braced for the worst as he walked over to the door labeled 69B.

Inside, the room was immaculate, save for a single garbage can by the door that was overflowing with combat MRE packets. An operating table was set up in the center of the room with body restraints in place, accompanied by a wide variety of white or silver medical equipment and white mobile cabinets on either side of the room. Even the body locked into the table seemed pristine, like it was sculpted into place and painted by an artist more divinely inspired than Henry Briggs himself after receiving the first vision of the Vanu some two hundred and sixty years ago. The young lady, likely in her early twenties, was dressed in nothing but a patient’s tunic where she lay, with a long IV tube connected to her right arm at the wrist as it dripped a clear liquid into her bloodstream. Stuffing his phone in his pocket, Edward rushed over to her side, placing two fingers at her throat. To his relief, he still felt a pulse. “Shit, is this one of the psycho ones?” he thought, glancing up to read the label on the massive jug where it hung on its stand, feeding liquid into her veins. He already knew what it as without reading, nothing more than a simple slow-drip concentrated narcotic that had kept her in a forced coma for god knows how long.

Without thinking, he reached down and pulled the needle out of her arm, only to start cursing himself out for stupidly doing so without bandages on hand as blood began to well up out of the hole. Scavenging briefly through the cabinets yielded the gauze he needed, which he quickly applied to where the needle had been inserted. He could feel her heart rate slowly approaching normality as he worked. His job done, he took a seat on the end of the table, repeatedly running his hands through his hair for several minutes on end as he thought over the consequences of what he had just done. “God, I’m in deep. Why the hell did I pull the damn IV! If some medic has to come in here and give her another MRE, he could be mauled if I don’t put her down! But unless they plan to keep her alive in captivity forever, they’ll put her down when she goes feral, too… Fuck me,” he muttered, rubbing his face.

Suddenly, he felt a tap on his shoulder that sent lightning down his spine. Leaping off of the table, he whipped about, his phone in hand and ready to throw at a moment’s notice. To his surprise, the young lady was sitting up on the table, silently staring at him without the slightest emotion. "Holy shit, how on god's green Auraxis is she already awake?!?" he thought, bewildered. Cautiously stowing his phone, he approached, the fear that she could very well leap up to attack him at any moment hindering his movement to a crawl as he braced for the worst. “Can you understand me?” he asked.

The young lady nodded, looking around the room in thought before returning her gaze to him.

“Can you speak?” he asked

To this, she didn’t respond, only glaring at him accusingly, as if to say “of course I can, you twat.” She remained silent, however, her gaze floating around the room as she seemed to ponder something. Her mouth opened, but she couldn't quite find the words she wanted. She tapped her lips with her finger, then tapped the side of her head.

“You can't speak?” Edward said.

The lady shook her head. “Do you know your clearance ID, your name, anything at all about why you’re here?” Edward continued.

The lady shook her head again. “Oh goddamn it, she’s completely off the radar,” he thought, nodding in response. In his mind, there was only one way out of this mess that might let him stay alive, maybe even a free man. “Alright, stay right here, I need to go make a phone call,” he said as he backed away, slipping through the door. He pulled out his phone once more, hastily pulling up his contacts to call one of the many emergency numbers saved in speed-dial. The phone had hardly rang before someone on the other side picked up. “Hey, Joey, it’s Ed,” he said, rubbing his forehead with his off-hand. “I need to ask you a favor. If I get you the photos, can you build me some paperwork to forge an ID?”


	4. Chapter 3

_Amerish – Mekala Tech Plant, 1300 hours_

“Three… two… one… ‘Aight, boys, let’s get wild!” The young man by the door yelled. He pulled the pin on two grenades – one a short-fused flash grenade that would go off first, the other a heavier concussion grenade he’d traded for at a bar with a fellow New Conglomerate soldier. Barely peeking around the door, he tossed both grenades inside, listening for two quick blasts to go off in quick succession before darting inside with his comrades close behind. The room quickly devolved into chaos as Terran Republic soldiers staggered about, deaf and blind and very, very angry. The young man took to the air with his jetpack, hovering across the high-ceiling room with his shotgun pressed tightly to his shoulder, raining a fiery hot spray of lead upon the few soldiers who weren’t staring at the flashbang when it went off. With the rest of the TR soldiers detained by his friends, the young man pointed to one of his friends who had just stepped into the room. “Race you to the top, Dan!” he yelled over the roar of his jetpack, darting up to the next floor.

“Ah ’course you’re gonna win, I gotta take the fuckin’ stairs,” the man yelled back. The only reply he got was the rapid pops of gunfire, spurring him up the staircase to the left of the door as fast as his legs could carry him. Just as he reached the top of the stairs, he watched as his jetpack-riding brother, James, was gunned down by several Terran soldiers hardly a few feet away.

The man shook his head in disgust, sighing. That’s the third time he’d died this week.

Fingering the trigger of his NC1 Gauss rifle, he braced the heavy railgun-assault rifle hybrid against the stair railing and opened fire, downing each of the approaching men with surgically-accurate three-round bursts to the head. “Two for the bull, one for the rider,” he thought as he swiftly pulled the trigger three final times, watching as the first two rounds riccochetted off of the over-armor shields of the last Terran, draining the shield batteries. With nothing left to stop it, the third round did the dirty work, sending the enemy soldier tumbling to the ground.

Seeing no more targets, he grabbed his rifle by the sling and threw it over his shoulder, pulling out his medical tool. With the squeeze of a large trigger, a laser-like stream of nanites shot out of the device, sinking into the chestpiece of his fallen brother’s armor. The New Conglomerate’s medical officer’s school had taught him the science of it -- that the nanites swarmed over the life support system of his armor, kicking the device into an overdrive frenzy that would heal critical wounds within seconds, even kick-start the heart of someone as shot-to-hell as James was. It was a painful process, but his little brother never seemed to learn that charging ahead solo got you shot. That, or he was a masochist that took pleasure in the pain of being revived.

Like a desert flower after a storm, James popped up from where he lay, dusting himself off as he crawled to his feet like nothing had happened. “Thanks, Dan. Where’d I be to claim the win without ya!” he said with a shit-eating grin.

“Jesus Christ James, you’ve gotta stay ALIVE to win a race,” Daniel retorted, breezing past his brother to a cylindrical computer terminal with a hologram screen, surrounded by server banks. “Gettin’ to the finish line don’t mean shit if they pump your guts so fulla lead it knocks you flat on ya ass five feet away. Besides, it ain’t good for ya to be usin’ the Tubes a whole bunch. I been hearin’ all sorts a nasty shit ‘bout them mixin’ up DNA, leavin’ people half-disfigured ‘n crap. I may be a doctor, but I can’t do a lick o’ good if they rebuild ya with ya head up ya ass.”

James shrugged nonchalantly. “So what? You’re always there to pick me up ‘n all, so why do I give a damn?”

Suddenly, Daniel glanced away from the computer screen, shooting his brother a dirty look. “You been raidin’ my painkillers again?”

Another shit-eating grin. “…and if I did?”

Daniel let out an exasperated sigh as he returned his attention to the computer, typing away into a command console the mission codes he’d been given to run. “Motherfucker, I’ma leave ya cold, dead body on the ground for those Terran fucks to toe-tag ya and stick ya in a freezer. I pay my good damn wages for those, ya dirty fuck…” he muttered. Despite being a medic for the New Conglomerate, the only regular medicine they handed out were for non-combatants, such as off-duty soldiers, civilians, and of course, the big-dog CEO’s. The Medical Nanite Applicator, his healing tool, was a fix-all so long as the combat life support module in a soldier’s armor wasn’t shot to hell, and even if it was, an engineer could fix it right quick with a Repair Nanite Applicator – the equivalent tool for fixing mechanical stuff. Between the two, there wasn’t technically a need for traditional medicine, but when shit hit the fan, there wasn’t an injury alive he, Daniel Wilde, felt like he couldn’t fix with a good old-fashioned field medical kit.

As such, he carried the kit wherever he went, but that also resulted in some scuffles with his younger brother, James Wilde, the squad point-man. Pilot extraordinaire, he was just as equally top-notch in a jet craft like the New Conglomerate “Reaver” fighter as he was taking to the skies with a jetpack, so he did whatever was needed most at the time. His gung-ho style of guns-blazing, in-your-face aggressiveness caught his enemies off guard, and was often the kind of break in the enemy defenses his squad needed, but it also frequently resulted in him getting shot by the first enemy to react. Because of this, James had developed a habit of preemptively raiding his older brother’s painkiller cache whenever he was out on duty, so if a bullet got through his over-armor shields and hurt him bad, he could keep fighting just that half-second longer it took to clean a room for his squad.

Daniel looked over the codes one final time before hitting the “enter” key. Suddenly, the lights went dim throughout the gargantuan manufacturing plant, then flickered back into life. The CEO’s of nearby mining corporations who controlled Mekala Tech Plant’s operations on a daily basis always held the upper hand, in the form of secret, hard-reset codes for the entire plant. Although the occupying Terran soldiers had changed the priorities for the building’s defenses, such as the hardlight energy shields that blocked the doors, a quick backdoor login with the administrator codes could put everything right in a jiffy. That also included resetting the automated defense turrets.

A loud alarm sounded out across the facility, indicating that the defenses were coming online. Like a roar of thunder, all of the Spitfire defense turrets across the facility focused on the nearest TR soldier in their vicinity and simultaneously opened fire. Within seconds, Daniel knew, every enemy in the facility would be face-down in their own blood. He stepped back from the terminal, giving his younger brother a well-deserved fistbump for clearing the zone around the computer terminal. “Now that’s what I call doctor-assisted homicide,” he said.

“Hell yeah, that was pretty sweet,” James replied, changing the magazine in DIY-modified shotgun he’d affectionately named the Brawler. With the magazine secure, he reached into his pocket and began slipping individual shotgun shells into the underbarrel shotgun he’d used moments before his death. Terran and Vanu soldiers thought the NC just had a bit of a shotgun fetish, but when you’re up close and personal with the enemy and your shotgun magazine runs dry, the last thing you wanted for an underbarrel weapon was any sort of grenade launcher. James could tell you that from experience. “Let’s go clear out that spawn room so we can get the hell outta here.”

* * *

 

Two hours and some four hundred gallons of spilled enemy blood later, the spawn room was cleared out of the last of enemy reinforcements. Thanks to the other skilled medics his his squadron, there were very few casualties that had to be sent back to the Respawn Tubes through the ordeal. Most of his squad sat around the room, cleaning their weapons or overseeing the return of Mekala’s working engineers to the reclaimed facilities, even helping out with a few repairs where necessary to fix the damage after such a quick, brutal takeover.

Since technical work wasn’t his favorite thing in the world, though, Daniel opted to take a seat on a bench in the spawn room near an equipment terminal, idly playing with his favorite piece of kit: a gold-plated .357 caliber snub-nosed revolver he had been given upon graduating from the New Conglomerate’s Combat Medic school, presented to him by his favorite old fogey on campus, who happened to also be his commanding officer. Each combat school’s senior officer picked the student who was the top of their class and presented them with a revolver like his, complete with their full name etched on the side. Most people saw it and assumed it meant he was the smart-ass valedictorian of his class, that the powers that be chose him over all others because he kissed enough hairy asses to weasel his way up to the top. To him, though, it meant the world. It symbolized how much he cared for his brother, that he worked so hard to become the best medic so that he could keep his brother fighting.

Holding his pointer finger straight, he spun the loaded revolver around his finger, tossing it into the air in a casual juggling game. As the revolver dropped out of the air, he snatched it by the grip, looking over the detailed engravings. _Daniel Thomas Wilde_ , the words read. “Hope they’re done with them damn repairs soon,” he thought. He pressed a button on the side of the gun. The revolver’s cylinder split in half, rotating out a few degrees to either side of the revolver frame to expose three cartridges on either side, their untouched primers glinting back at him in the dull blue-ish light from the halogen lamps above. Satisfied that everything about the gun seemed in order, he pressed the two halves of the cylinder together, the spring-loaded latch that held them together locking shut with a muted click.

“Hey, Dan,” he could hear his brother call. He glanced up to see James standing in the doorway, leaning up against the doorframe with his helmet under his left arm. His short, spiky light brown hair had suffered a pretty bad case of helmet head that made Daniel chuckle under his breath.. “CEO’s of AmeriCorp just phoned in,” James said. “Says his facilities need a supply drop, so I’m headed out to go guard some dropships. I’ll be back tonight, ‘aight?”

Daniel nodded. “I’ll save ya a brew. Have fun, don’t die, all that crud,” he said, waving his brother off. Locking eyes with the young man, he nodded once and watched as his brother turned around and stepped out, disappearing behind the doorframe. “Ten to one odds I’ll be having to leave another bottle at the Tubes depot again,” he sighed, shaking his head. Stowing his revolver in its leg holster, he picked up his gauss rifle and headed for the door. “Probably should help out if I wanna get out of here faster…”


	5. Chapter 4

_Indar — The Crown, 1700 hours_

The air was filled, not just with sound and light. “Aircraft, flying shrapnel, charged plasma, you name it,” she thought. The Vanu Sovereignty and the Terran Republic were at each other’s throats over the spire-like air base that stood upon the high rocky outcropping known as the Crown, once again throwing everything but the kitchen sink at each other, for the trillionth time it seemed. Being at the center of the continent and having a vantage point over surrounding bases and research laboratories for miles, it was a prime point for the chaos of the never-ending war.

And it was the Crown where Captain Sofia “Iron Lady” Izetta thrived.

Peering out from behind a shipping container, she briefly scanned her surroundings before reaching for a heavy fragmentation grenade from her bandolier, depressing the arming button before lobbing it as hard as she could toward the first story balcony that ringed the outside of the air base. Her eyes never left the balcony as she raised her weapon once more with one hand, waving toward the rest of her squad hiding behind the rocky outcroppings nearby to move up with her. Sure enough, a lone purple-clad light assault trooper jumped over the railing of the building’s walls and dropped to the ground outside, flaring his jetpack’s engines to slow his fall. With a quick burst from her light machine gun, the man dropped to the ground, lifeless before he even touched down. As soon as the grenade went off, she sprinted for the massive building before her, pressing her back against the wall next to a doorway she knew led into the ground floor. Like magic, her squadron was with her, formed up against the wall behind her and on the opposite side of the doorframe. Over the din of the battlefield, she could hear the distinct chirp of automated sentries inside, lurking in some corner of a building she knew all too well. Her mind ran over the possible layouts of the inside defense, taking every possibility she could conceive of into account.

After a brief moment of thought, she decided on a plan. “Two sentries, stairwells on either side of the door,” she said to her squadron point-man across the doorway from her.

The young man nodded. “Flashbang the upper stairwell and push the engineers out. Same old, same old,” he said. “On my count.”

The young pointman was showing promise, Sofia thought. Not a grade-A student in training, but he had definitely caught up and even surpassed several of the other new recruits in her squad by a wide margin. Perhaps maybe even officer materiel, in time.

“Three, two, one, smoke ‘em,” the pointman said. Like clockwork, the squadron pushed in the moment the pointman pulled the pin on a flashbang grenade. Sofia was the first in behind her pointman, her light machine gun in hand. She pulled the weapon to her shoulder and leveled the weapon’s sights on the stairwell to the left side of the doorway, taking aim at a bulky auto-turret waiting for her advance. With a squeeze of the trigger, the heavy machine gun shook in her iron grip, hosing down the turret with bullets before it could even detect her presence. Without even a moment’s glance at her handiwork, she turned the heavy weapon toward the closest Vanu soldier on the stairwell and opened fire, dropping him quickly. Storming up the stairs with half of her squadron in tow, she sprinted up the stairs that led over the tank deployment platforms to the next floor.

Like clockwork, as she reached the door to the second floor, a grenade came bouncing down through the open doorway. “Shields up!” Sofia barked, reaching for a button on the side of her helmet. With a soft click of the button, the hum of her armor’s overshield generator filled her ears as a pulsing red energy field engulfed her, layered over her like a thick jacket just in time to catch the brunt of the explosion as the grenade went off hardly two feet behind her. Her helmet’s heads-up display flashed red as the shield ate the explosive’s shrapnel, dissipating its energy and leaving her unscathed.

“Move, move!” She barked, rushing through the doorway. Instinctively raising her light machine gun to a platform above, she took aim and opened fire on the surprised Vanu soldiers, caught off guard by the surprising rush offensive from their red-clad aversaries. Heads popped as the combined fire of her squad scythed down the defenders.

Within moments, a torrent of Terran Republic soldiers pushed up through the stairwell behind her. Sofia lowered her rifle and strolled into a small side-room where a cylindrical tower-like computer stood, holographic keyboard waiting and ready for inputs. “Too easy,” she thought.

* * *

 

The Vanu forces at the Crown had fallen within minutes. “Almost like they weren’t even trying,” she thought as she sat on the edge of one of the four wide aircraft resupply platforms that jutted out of the Crown’s spire, her legs dangling over the edge. “No matter how many times we try, what tactics we use, he won’t come out…”

“Still bitter, ma’am?” A voice over her shoulder said. She didn’t bother to look back at the newcomer; her second-in-command, Johannes Friedrickson, loved trying to sneak up on her. “Catching the tiger by the tail,” he would call it. “That was over a year ago now. I’m surprised you even still give a shit,” Johannes added.

“Tell me, corporal,” Sofia said, “…If someone busted your balls and made you sing opera for the whole world to see, you’re telling me you wouldn’t want to make that fucker shit out his own teeth if it took more than three days to find him?”

The man took a seat next to her on the edge of the platform, removing his helmet. He had soft facial features, striking green eyes, and kept himself clean-shaven and his ruffled brown hair short — something she appreciated in a world where men thought blowing up tanks gave them the right to smell like they hadn’t showered since the colony ships first touched down fifty years ago. “No, I’d bust their ass, for sure. I just don’t see the point of this,” he said, gesturing to his surroundings with wide-spread arms. “We’ve been running this game of yours for more than three months now. I see it in your plans. You run the same strategies over and over, waiting for whoever this shady “Moses” guy is to rip your team a new one like last time so you can hand-deliver him a grenade. It’s getting to a point where we’re setting new records on taking the Crown back from the Vanu, the New Conglomerate, hell, sometimes both. Every time, the guy’s a no-show.”

Sofia looked down to the ground below, focusing on a landmass she knew every nook and cranny of: a large land bridge of solid rock, naturally formed by god knows what, that spanned a drop of several hundred feet, connecting the Crown with a nearby supply depot. She could remember it like it was yesterday; Her and her team were rushing the Crown from the supply depot along the land bridge, leading the charge. Under her orders, several of her squad members had donned heavy exosuits known as MAX suits — heavily modified mining exoskeletons upgraded to carry armor and weapons ranging from chainguns to grenade launchers, even small anti-aircraft flak guns. With that kind of firepower, and after dealing with any anti-tank emplacements, a frontal assault would turn from a grueling slog to nothing less than a total joke, in theory. That’s the way it had been for the past forty years of her service, anyway.

As they were progressing along the land bridge with support from the armored battle suits, a lone rifleman appeared amidst the fighting on the platform Sofia now sat on. One by one, he dropped the twelve armored exosuits with a single shot that sounded like the thunder of God, each round punching clean through the MAX suit’s armored helmets like wet paper. The rest of her squad broke into a panic and dove for cover, barely even blind-firing over the crags of the rocky land bridge in fear of their weapon exploding in their hands from a single shot from that man’s gun. Although she was able to regroup her men and coordinate with another squadron to successfully take the Crown that day, it had been an utter embarrassment; the squad under the command of the notorious “Iron Lady” supposedly the strictest and strongest of the recruit-training squadrons, had broken down like a bunch of babies. It had tarnished Sofia’s career, seemingly permanently. No one knew what happened to those infamous recruits under her command that day. There were still rumors, even three months after the event, that Sofia herself had wiped their data from the Reconstruction Tubes databanks and executed them all herself.

“We have to keep trying,” she replied. “I don’t care how many years it takes, I’m going to find that bastard and skin him alive, show him what true pain is. Anyway, the right stairwell during the assault. How did B team hold up?”

“Like clockwork,” Johannes said. “Cleaned ‘em out, no major incidents. I think our pointman’s done now, ain’t he? Jacob was his name, right?”

Sofia nodded. “Yeah, this was his last. HQ said they already had someone lined up to take his spot. At least someone upstairs still sees us as competent, I guess.”

“More than competent, ma’am,” Johannes laughed. “Brigadier General Crags still thinks you’re the second coming of Jesus in terms of training troublesome recruits.”

“Stop kissing ass if you don’t want to eat shit, corporal,” Sofia grumbled. Sliding back from the edge of the platform, she hopped to her feet and picked up her light machine gun, attaching it to the magnetic hardpoint on the back of her chestplate next to her rocket launcher. “Let’s go give them a speech, I suppose.”

* * *

 

Sofia stood at the front of the command room at the top of the Crown’s spire, looking out through the energy-shield-guarded doors toward the platform she had just been sitting on as she gathered her first few words to her squadron. Fifteen men, including Johannes, stood before her in two staggered rows, awaiting their squadron commander’s first words.

“So, I suppose you think you are all, shall we say, ‘hot shit’ right now, correct?” She began. “And you might be right. We reached within fifteen seconds of our previous record time for capturing this base.”

Her squadron let out a solid round of cheers, high-fiving each other for their success. “However!” Sofia barked, regaining their attention immediately, “there is no such thing as perfection. Miller!”

A young man from the second row stepped forward, locking eyes with her at once. “Crossing the land bridge, you missed your grenade toss on those entrenched MANA engineer turrets by a mile. Utterly embarrassing. Almost turned one of our men into swiss cheese, if he hadn’t the presence of mind to engage his overshield to take the blast,” she announced. At this, the entire squadron booed their comrade, but the embarrassed young man didn’t dare look away from Sofia for a moment as she eyed her squad into silent submission. “Expect double PT every day until I see you stop pitching grenades that make a crippled man look like an Olympic athlete.”

“Yes, captain!” The young man replied. He waited until Sofia gave him a nod before stepping back into line, still red at the cheeks from embarrassment. One of his squadmates jokingly slapped him over the back of the head, but Sofia was quick on the draw. “Mark! Get up here!” she snapped, glaring at the offending soldier as he stepped forward sheepishly. “Take off your helmet.”

As soon as the young man took his helmet off, Sofia viciously backhanded the man across the face. “You don’t fuck around when I’m chewing someone out unless you want to join him. Understand?” She growled. “You can join Miller on his PT. Since you’re new, consider this a mild warning. Next time, you get a double sentence.” All color drained from the young man’s face, save for the red marks in the shape of the backside of her armored gauntlet where it had hit him. She knew she had to instill fear in the recruits each time she got a new one, and Mark was no exception. His squad mates would be letting him know just how easy he’d gotten it. With any luck, their horror stories would do the work for her.

“Now, with that out of the way,” Sofia began, “we have a graduating member. Jacob Smith, as you know, was tired of all of your bullshit, and so decided to get his ass in gear and graduate!”

All eyes turned toward the squad pointman at the end of the back row, standing proudly with a grin on his face. “Figured I might as well lose brain cells elsewhere,” he retorted.

“Good, because I was getting tired of your smart-ass attitude,” Sofia replied. “I forwarded your assignment info to your data logs. You’ll report to Commander Hughes tomorrow morning. Now get the hell out of here!” she ordered.

The young pointman gave Sofia a brief salute before heading for the door, letting out a triumphant cry with his fists in the air the moment he stepped outside. Sophia watched with the beginnings of a smile from the corner of her mouth as he sprinted toward the far end of one of the aircraft resupply pads, throwing himself off the edge to hover down to the ground below with his jetpack. “Now, as for you shitheads, we’ve got orders for tomorrow, so PT’s on hold,” she declared, turning to the rest of her squad. “Sleep armed. Expect a proper Vanu-sponsored wakeup call. We’ll be out of here after that, headed for Esamir, so get your game face on. First man I hear bitching about the cold gets to scrub everyone’s armor, got it?

The entire squad simultaneously saluted. “Yes, captain!”


	6. Chapter 5

**Six Months Later…**

_Outer Space — Vanu Orbital Headquarters, 1100 hours_

Edward looked over the device with restrained enthusiasm, watching as the two Sovereignty engineers under his instruction installed it in its custom-built slot in the data-transfer relay of one of the space station’s banks of Reconstruction Tubes. Transferring the entire human genome from a databank to the world’s most complex 3D printer took time; three to four days to be exact, he thought. Transmitting all that data, regardless of distance, was the single largest bottleneck in the process. After all the developments in quantum computing over the centuries, it had come down to the point where fiber optics had reached their limit, and with any luck, he and his crew were on the verge of surpassing that limit.

“You really think this is going to work, doctor Saller?” one of the engineers idly asked, his deft hands flying over the alien device to get it connected to the data relay. “I mean, the principles seem sound, but using the original Vanu hardware… that doesn’t seem sketchy in the slightest? I mean, what if this thing straight nukes the entire station, or-”

Edward laughed. “I trust the Vanu a hell of a lot more than I trust myself, Jimmy. If anything, I’d be afraid that something with MY name on it ends up blowing us up, not some long-dead alien race. It’s a transmitter from an original Vanu comms relay, we know that, and that’s exactly what we were looking for. If we’re right, we’ll be cutting down the redeploy time of our soldiers from days to minutes. If that doesn’t give you chills of excitement, then you must have the world’s most hottest sex life instead, ‘cause this is as good as it gets.”

“He’s just nervous,” the other engineer said, looking up from the data relay’s control panel. “Personally can’t wait to fire her up myself. No more missing TV episodes when you catch shrapnel in the dome or some other BS!”

“Not for a while, Bill, not for a while,” Edward replied. “Even if we get this up and running, you know they’re only going to let the top brass use it. She’s the going to turn this entire bank into the gold-plated limousine of Reconstruction Tubes, so only the best of the best will get ‘em,” he added, nodding toward the alien device now mounted. “Hell, even I only get to be the guinea pig once or twice, to make sure it isn’t going to shit out on us mid-reconstruction and leave some angry field captain disfigured enough to be shitting out his innards. The ground team should be retrieving the rest of these relay modules, but even if we get all three of the ones we didn’t break, it’ll be a while before we build our own for the rest of the banks of Tubes.”

“Yeah, I don’t envy you at all some times,” the engineer named Jimmy said with a sigh. “So, you just going to run off somewhere and put a bullet in your noggin to test the Tubes out? With your recent combat records, I’d be worried about the TR or NC running out of guys to throw at you!”

“Hah! I wish,” Edward replied. “Nah, I’ll figure something out.” He knew his recent combat records were a lie, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Every mission he had been on since finding Charlotte in Lab 69, he had taken her with him, and her combat prowess from her implanted memories and instincts showed. Almost anyone else might have had issues explaining how they killed two hundred and fifty men from almost a kilometer away in the span of a few hours, but Edward’s combat record after fighting for the entirety of the war thus far, and perhaps his ties to the Council, had let his illicit protégé fly under the radar while at his side.

The engineer at the data relay’s control panel waited for his companion to stand clear of the exposed circuitry wired to the alien device before flipping the single physical switch on the device’s exterior. The hum of dangerously high-voltage transformers filled the hall as the massive machine began its startup sequence, displaying the entire process on the screen as it went through each step. “Seems like she’s running smoothly so far, Ed,” Bill said, nodding in harmony with the device as new notifications scrolled by on the screen. “I guess Jimmy and I will keep her running smooth while you do your thing.”

“Thanks, guys,” Edward said, patting them both on the back. “When you get the chance, run down to the mess hall down by my office and steal the coffee machine — oh, and look in the cabinet right above the second fridge from the right, I keep part of my secret coffee stash in there behind a fake wall, so help yourself to some of that in the meantime. I’ll want a cup or two after I get out, if I’m not rushed to the ER from internal bleeding.” Their work with him over the past few days deserved a bit of a treat, and with the war making any sort of agriculture outside of the absolutely necessary nigh impossible, the twenty-pound bags of fresh coffee beans he kept stashed around the space station were worth their weight in gold. Many hours of work had gone into paying for bribing his fellow scientists into sneakily growing the beans in the back corners of Biolab greenhouses, and they were his pride and joy, a celebration treat better than aged wine to him.

Watching the two engineers fistbump each other in celebration, Edward headed for the door, stepping out into one of the three long, circular hallways that ran around the station. Idly browsing his email on his phone as he walked, he backtracked his way around the station to his office, the small glass window in his office door covered with a singular sheet of paper that read “do not disturb” in large block font.

Sliding his security key into the door, the two thick plates of metal slid open, revealing a pitch-black room inside. The doors slid shut behind him as he reached for the light switch, filling the room with cold, blue-ish halogen light. The office had hardly changed over the past six months, with the exception of a penned-off area in the back-right corner of the room, surrounded by a small jury-rigged curtain. He stepped over to the curtain and poked his head inside, finding a mound of blankets piled on top of an improvised bed on top of a spare desk he nicked from an empty office. “Hey, Char, time to get up. We’ve got a job,” he said.

The blankets shuffled and parted as Charlotte poked her head up, her short, silvery-grey hair frizzled from a bad case of bedhead. Rubbing her eyes open, she stared back with her striking blue eyes, silently questioning his decision to wake her up.

“Yeah, you heard me,” Edward insisted. “Gotta go get ourselves killed for the great name of Vanu. Might as well knock a few heads while we’re at it.”

Without so much as a word spoken, she sat up in bed, holding blankets to her chest. Edward closed the heavy curtain and waited for her to get re-dressed, idly listening to his wall clock as it ticked away the seconds. Soon, she emerged from her curtained-off “room” dressed in her usual outfit of a white button-up blouse, dark black dress pants and black low-heel dress shoes — her only outfit, a spare secretary’s uniform borrowed from Cecilia Monaghan, the gunner of Felix’s Valkyrie aircraft. Her striking silver hair never ceased to catch his eye. Combined with her light blue eyes, he had initially suspected a malfunction in the Reconstruction Tubes when her body was created that had led to albinism, but she hadn’t seemed to suffer from any other otherwise obvious effects of the condition, like the need for sunglasses nearly everywhere, so he wasn’t quite sure.

“Got your ID?” he asked. The young lady withdrew her keycard from her pants pocket, holding it up for him to see. “Alright, just checking,” he conceded, holding his hands up in defeat. “Can’t be too sure. Last thing we need is you getting locked in somewhere you shouldn’t be and getting in trouble.”

Standing in the doorway to block the automatic steel door’s sensor, he followed Charlotte out of his office, walking alongside her. Silently, the two walked along the outer ring corridor of the station, transferring to one of the inner “rings” of the station on their way toward the orbital station’s armory. “She still has barely spoken since those first few days,” he thought as he walked, looking down at his younger companion. “She was pretty sassy for about a month, but even what’s left of her old personality has decayed after her vocabulary went. She seems to understand me just fine, and she’s done fine with language lessons when I force her to, just to make sure she doesn’t totally regress to a caveman, but… maybe she’s just not comfortable speaking or something…”

Soon, the two reached the armory, its imposing blast doors locked shut before them. Removing his keycard from the small carabiner clipped to one of the belt loops of his pants, he slid the carbon-fiber-encased computer chip into the reader and held it there until a small light on the reader flashed green. The hiss and clatter of hydraulic locks undoing themselves rang out from the thick steel moments before the blast doors parted, revealing the locker-room-like facilities inside.

Walking along the rows of storage lockers, his eyes scanned the bold stenciled numbers on the tall metal doors until he found the few assigned to him. Most soldiers only had one or two lockers, but he usually had anywhere between three and five, depending on how many weapons projects he had lined up for testing on that particular day. Today, he only had four: one for his suit and engineering gear, one for the bulky “Archer” anti-materiel rifle and its submachine gun complement, and the other for his other current project, codenamed “Phaseshift”. That one was Charlotte’s go-to weapon. The fourth held Charlotte’s “infiltrator” type combat suit; the locker was under his name because only soldiers with upper clearance could have a locker at the station. Any soldier without VS-3 clearance simply kept their combat suit with them in their barracks and grabbed a fresh weapon from one of the many weapons construction terminals found at any ground base, so they had no need for a locker with which to store personalized gear. “I still don’t even think she has VS-1 clearance yet. It got her into the ranks, but even Joey’s forgery jobs aren’t good enough to get you any kind of clearance,” he thought.

Sliding his keycard into the three lockers’ readers one by one, he swung the metal doors open and withdrew his combat suit, the purple plate armor glistening in the unnatural light of the armory’s halogen bulbs. Charlotte quickly retrieved hers and pushed past him, disappearing around a corner to go get changed. Hastily unbuttoning his shirt, he slipped out of his lab coat and the rest of his work outfit before sliding into his combat suit, the black form-fitting fabric jumpsuit underneath the armor like silk against his skin. He hastily zipped up the suit and slid his helmet over his head before pressing a button on the side of his helmet, booting up the onboard computer. He could feel the custom-fitted armor clamp down around his body as his chest armor latched into place, the suit’s nanoweave force shield generator coming online within seconds.

As the heads-up display popped up on his visor, Charlotte returned with her clothes in her hand, wearing her own form-fitting combat suit, sans the helmet. “I never thought about it, but I guess they made her short and slender on purpose,” he thought as he retrieved his heavy rifle and submachine gun from their locker, looking over his companion from the corner of his eye. “Smaller body means her suit’s cloaking device doesn’t spend as much energy keeping her cloaked. Crack shot with a rifle, too. Born and bred ‘Infiltrator’ type soldier from day one…”

Edward returned his attention to his rifle, checking that the magnified optics were exactly as he left them from the last mission. Attaching the small auto-pistol to the magnetic hardpoint on his right thigh, he set the butt of the heavy rifle against his leg and racked the bolt, loading a fresh cartridge. “Smoother than silk,” he thought as he attached the rifle to his back and fished out the rest of his engineering gear: his Nanite repair tool, a few single-use constructing devices built to construct automated sentries, his specially modified beacon, a pouch of basic hand-tools, and a bandolier of grenades. “Fifty years, and it never gets any lighter,” he grumbled as he strapped on the last of his gear to their magnetic hardpoints on his armor.

Testing to ensure that his weapons were secured tightly, he looked over to Charlotte to make sure that she was ready. She had donned her helmet, her soft-looking face sealed behind a mono-body mask of nanoweave carbon fiber and layered matrix steel. The green crystalline three-prong design on her faceplate glowed dimly, matching the Vanu logo on her carbon-nanoweave breastplate. “Pure nightmare fuel for anyone on her bad side,” he thought as he watched her pull her rifle out of its locker, loading one of her three nuclear-powered capacitors into the prototype weapon before affixing it to her back.

“Ready?” She asked softly.

“Ready as always, Char.”


	7. Chapter 6

_Esamir – middle of nowhere, 1400 hours_

Sofia stepped out of the tunnel, shielding her eyes against the bright, cloudless Esamir sky as they readjusted to the blinding daylight. “Thank god that pigshit’s over with,” she thought, looking around. “Thought it was going to turn into a bloody moshpit in there. Even the well-laid fortifications of the underground Nanite Analysis facility over on Amerish turn into a meat grinder on a good day, but that damn excavation site…” She shuddered at the thought of how badly that operation could have gone if even just a few more squadrons of the Sovereignty were present.

“Captain!” a voice called out from the tunnel behind her. Turning back toward the dimly lit tunnel, she could make out someone running toward her. Slowing to a jog, the young man stepped out into the light and briefly saluted her. “We’ve just received confirmation that the techs back out at Orbital HQ got the device this time, and have it hooked up. Guess they were able to decipher the geek-speak in those encrypted Vanu documents our spies swiped a week or so ago. They’ve got you lined up to give it a go.”

“Fine, now let’s get the hell out of here before those rebel scum Conglomerate turds show up,” she ordered, starting back into the tunnel with the young man hot on her heels. “This is the second time we’ve taken this damn facility, and I don’t want some stupid gearhead technician telling me he got us all royally fucked by tripping some trap left behind by those blue assholes.” The first time, she knew, the technician crew she had escorted into the Vanu Sovereignty-formed dig site had been compromised by a New Conglomerate spy, who had used the Sovereignty-made teleporter left behind at the site to ship one of the two remaining alien devices back to some rich corporate CEO’s vault. She had found out and executed him on the spot, of course, but it had already been too late; the device was in the hands of the NC, and a well-laid trap had forced her and her squadron out of the dig site. This time, she had taken the facility back from the NC and was ready to try again, this time watching over the trans-mat delivery process herself with her handgun at the technician’s head.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, she found herself standing before a cavernous underground room dug straight out of rock, the high dome-shaped ceiling carved right out of the rock that formed the mountain ridge above them. All around the massive room, her squadron went about their business polishing up their weapons. A few soldiers caught her eye, though: Four of her men were seated about a shipping crate, slinging cards across the improvised table in a game of poker. Glancing over to the soldier who had given her the report, she motioned for him to be silent before walking around the edge of the room toward the gambling men.

She had almost made it to the table when another of her soldiers, seated on the ground not too far from the gamblers, stood up and saluted toward her. Almost instantly, the four seated around the crate swept up the cards, the thin pieces of reinforced paper disappearing like magic into the soldiers’ uniforms’ sleeves. “They hired him as a damn lookout, those sons-of-bitches,” she thought to herself, giving the saluting soldier a nasty glare.

“Yes, Captain?” one of the gamblers said, turning to face her. His shaggy dark-brown hair and permanent easygoing grin were recognizable from a mile away. Nothing infuriated her more than that shit-eating smile he wore, especially when he caught him red-handed breaking almost any Terran Republic policy.

“Cards, private,” Sofia growled, her hand outstretched. As the soldier reached out to drop the cards into her open palm, she snatched his wrist and yanked him forward, catching his face with her other metal-plated hand and throwing him to the ground. Planting one of her heavy, armored greaves on the small of his back, she looked down at the writhing soldier with a gleam in her eye. “Private Smalls, you’ve failed Infiltrator school, but I’ll be damned if you fail me. Clearly, the two-and-a-half years of PT you owe me doesn’t quite mean enough, so we’ll try something different,” she barked, reaching for her sidearm.

As she leveled the handgun at the back of the young man’s head, an explosion rang out throughout the cavernous room. “Rebels are here!” A voice cried out from the entrance tunnel. All around the room, Sofia’s squad scrambled for their weapons, hastily packing away their cleaning supplies to get ready for the fight ahead of them.

“Well, I guess it’s your lucky day, Private,” Sofia said, lifting the man to his feet by the neck of his form-fitting jumpsuit. “Now suit up and get the fuck out of my sight before I change my mind.”

“Yes, Captain,” the young man said, hastily sweeping up his part of the deck of cards he had dropped and jamming them in his pocket.

* * *

 

“Jeez, that hurt,” the young gambler thought, stretching out his spine in an attempt to undo the damage his overbearing captain had wrought. Collecting the rest of his deck of cards from his friends, he stuffed them back in their well-worn steel container as he meandered over to his waiting MAX suit, its chest plate resting against its thick steel legs. “Hey, babe, ready for another round?” he thought as he stepped up to the armored exosuit, gently sliding the steel cards packet into a small gap he’d fashioned in the suit’s interior padding around the right shoulder. Turning around, he gently climbed backward into the suit, slipping his legs into the padded interiors of the heavy powered armor suit.

As he slid his hands into the gauntlets of the MAX suit, the powerful turbines on the machine’s back sprung into life. The suit’s hydraulics unlocked, letting the arms and legs move freely; the heavy armor, however, never weighed down on his body for a moment as he reached down for his chestplate, pressing it against his torso until the system’s hydraulic locks latched it in place. “Last piece,” he thought as he reached down for the helmet, taking a moment to look over a small inscription just inside the helmet below the visor from the previous owner of the suit that read “she does the thinking for you”. “Damn straight she does,” he thought.

Slipping the helmet on, the device latched into place with the suit’s neck joint, securely attached to the rest of the suit. With the flicker of worn LED’s blinking into life, a heads-up display appeared on the inside of his helmet, detailing everything he needed to know; pressure for the hydraulics that moved the suit’s limbs, the integrity of his armor, even the ammo count of the attached weapons — which read as zero, because he had detached the weapons for cleaning before getting sidetracked with poker.

Stomping over to the poker table in his MAX suit, he reached down and picked up his two weapons, one a hefty grenade launcher, the other a belt-fed chaingun. One by one, he held the bulky weapons up to the mounting hardpoints on the back of his suit’s arms, waiting for them to automatically affix themselves and link into the suit’s control software. With a digital chirp and a brief notification on his visor’s HUD, the ammunition counts for each of the weapons updated, showing a full magazine for each.

“Alright, babe, let’s get this party started,” he muttered to himself as he jogged off toward the cavernous dig site’s entrance, each step a resounding mechanical boom in his ears as he chased after his long-since-gone squad.

* * *

 

“A’ight, boys, let’s get wild!” Daniel yelled, raising his gauss rifle to his shoulder. The blue-clad squadron behind him let out a rallying cheer in response to his signature war cry as they readied for combat, opening fire on the first of the Terran Republic soldiers that filed out of the tunnel some hundred meters away. Along the muddy, snow-dusted dirt road to the tunnel he jogged, firing his rifle in one-second intervals in the general direction of the tunnel to force his enemies to take shelter from the hail of incoming fire he and his squadmates provided. Over the sights of his rifle, he watched as his brother James and a few other jetpack-toting light assault troopers took to the mountain to his left like wild goats, scampering along the steep rocky hills with uncanny speed. It was a classic tactic; get men just above the door that formed a bottleneck, and the enemy couldn’t come out of their hidey-holes without catching a bullet in the skull. If they tried to peek the doorway and clean the light assaults out, his men would be waiting from the side to take them down. “The only thing we need now is a recon on the hills across from the shaft itself, so they could fire down into the cave from cover…” he thought.

Just as his brother reached his position above the tunnel’s entryway, a heavily-armored MAX suit came barreling out of the tunnel, guns blazing. James was quick to unload his shotgun’s magazine at the metal monster, but the hot steel pellets did hardly more than scratch the armor’s red and grey paint scheme. The MAX suit turned one of its heavy gun-toting arms toward the young warrior, raising its heavy grenade launcher to swat the man off of the mountainside. James instinctively reached for his grenade bandolier, flicking a flashbang grenade toward his opponent.

“Get that motherfucker outta here!” Daniel yelled, pointing at the MAX unit as it shielded its eyes against the stunning blast of light. As the squad anti-tank soldier stepped forward, he readied a rocket launcher against his shoulder and took aim at the MAX suit some sixty meters away.

Then, all hell broke loose.

A thunderous clap resounded from the mountainside somewhere behind the squad. Before he knew it, the launcher-toting soldier was face-first sprawled out on the dirt road, a jagged hole in the back of his helmet, and he was being dragged to the ground by a squadmate shouting “sniper!” at the top of his lungs. Out of reflex, the squad engineer tossed down a small metal plate that extended into a thin metal frame, a blue energy field filling in the space to form a wide protective barrier. “Get ‘im up, doc!” the engineer yelled, nodding toward the fallen soldier as he peered through the translucent blue shield, looking for any sign of the mysterious sniper.

Daniel slapped his rifle onto the hardpoint on his back and reached for his medical tool. “Come on, bud, get up!” he thought, leveling the handgun-like tool at the dead soldier and pulling the trigger. As the device did his work, another shot rang out, this time in front of the squad somewhere far off in the distant mountain ranges. “Holy shit, we’re surrounded by these damn snipers!” he thought as he looked up to see who had fallen. To his surprise, however, he watched as the MAX suit soldier up the road dropped to his knees, a nasty fist-sized hole in its chest. His brother was nowhere in sight.

“What the unholy hell is going on…” he thought.

* * *

 

“We’re tearing these guys a new one,” Edward thought as he chambered a new round into his anti-materiel rifle. The poor soldier in the MAX suit hadn’t even stood a chance; even the significantly more advanced suits the Vanu Sovereignty used hardly stood a chance at stopping such a large round, and the Terran Republic’s armor technology was a far cry from that, he knew. Edward pressed a button on the side of his helmet to activate his microphone “You deal with those New Conglomerate guys yet, Char?” he asked.

Radio silence greeted his question, only to be broken by the unnerving crack and whine of Charlotte’s plasma rifle spitting out another deadly round from some unseen crevice in the mountainside. “I take that as a yes,” he muttered as he readjusted his rifle, taking aim straight down the length of the dig site’s entrance tunnel. “Now if only I had a rocket launcher to ram down that TR squad’s throats right now…”

Cries from the pinned New Conglomerate soldiers rang out as they turned their weapons to the mountainside above the road behind them. At once, he knew she had finally been spotted, and turned his rifle to face the NC forces. “You’ve gotta be kidding me, Char,” he thought as he looked through his rifle’s optics at the blue-clad soldiers, watching them spray rounds almost indiscriminately to the rocky crags above. None of the NC soldiers seemed to have a clue to where she was.

“…although I can’t say I do, either,” he thought, surveying the mountainside in hopes of finding his friend. “I need to take the pressure off her so she can get a shot.” He lowered his aim back toward the center of the mass of NC soldiers huddled up behind the engineer’s Hard-Light barrier and took a deep breath, steadying his aim upon the soldier with the medical cross emblazoned on the front of his helmet.

With a gentle squeeze of the trigger, the rifle spat out another fiery round. To his surprise, however, the bullet deviated, dipping low and to the right. The round impacted the man in his right thigh, snapping what remained of his leg clean off and sending him tumbling to the ground. Hastily rechambering a third cartridge, he took aim once more and sent another round on its way, finishing the job. “Shit, I might be getting too old for this crap,” he thought with a shake of his head. “Could’ve sworn that was dead on, and there’s hardly any wind today…”

An earsplitting snap rang out, causing Edward to jump in his skin. “Fuck me, that was fast. Those reds didn’t waste any time finding me,” he thought as he turned his rifle to the entrance of the tunnel, firing blindly into the dark pit in hopes of scaring, or maybe even hitting, whoever had shot at him. The snap of passing bullets split the air as he turned around to take cover behind the top of the stony ridge, pounding out the staccato rhythm that he knew only a semi-automatic rifle could provide.

Just as he reached the top of the ridge, he felt a piercing pain shoot through his body just as he began to step down into cover. His legs gave out from underneath him from the shock, sending him tumbling to the ground just behind the top of the stone ridge. “Shit, it never stops fucking hurting,” he groaned, looking down at his torso. There wasn’t any puncture wound on his front side.

“Fuck, they got me good. Probably still lodged in me after it lost a lot of it’s energy getting through the suit’s shields and armor,” he thought. Over the muffled yelling of the distant soldiers, he heard the resounding thump of a rocket being launched, followed by the roaring explosion and hiss of flying shrapnel hitting the ground for hundreds of yards around. “Did they…?” he thought as he rolled himself over onto his stomach, letting out a cough that sprayed the glistening snow below him with crimson blood. With every ounce of strength he had, he crawled up to the ridge and peeked over, following the trail of smoke from the NC soldiers’ position to a small peak high above the mountain. Through the smoke and debris, a chunk of rock the size of a Prowler came flying, bouncing off the mountain as it tumbled downward, each impact throwing off more boulders in a cascading rockslide. The rumble became louder and louder, until finally the shower of sliding stone slammed into the dirt road, crushing the NC soldiers in their path. To his surprise, however, a jet of dust shot out of the dig site’s tunnel, throwing a few Terran soldiers clear out of the tunnel and sending them tumbling down the small ravine between Edward and the tunnel.

“I guess all that shaking collapsed the dig site. Probably killed all the TR forces in there,” he thought, silently grinning as his vision started to dim. “Not a chance in hell Charlotte got off that mountainside before all that shit came down. Thank god I got her registered with the Tubes last week…”

As the rumbling subsided, his vision finally faded to black, the last bloody sigh escaping from his shredded lungs.

* * *

 

“Bio signs for Ed just stopped, Bill,” Jimmy said, sipping a cup of fresh coffee as he looked over his laptop’s screen. “Same for this other ID, whoever she is. Ed wanted her in on the project as backup, I guess.”

“Alright, I’ll flip the switch, gimme a sec,” Bill replied, setting down his own mug and placing his hands on the keyboard connected to the data relay they had worked on. Typing in the two ID’s into the databank pulled up the network of files he needed. “Hitting the button in three, two, one…”

Within a fraction of a second, the data “transfer status” indicator bar on the screen flashed from 0% to 100%. “Holy smokes, that’s fast. Ed wasn’t kidding when he said it’d be fast…”

Suddenly, a bright light filled the room, emanating from the Vanu alien technology mounted in the data transmitter. “What the fuck?” Bill shouted, shielding his eyes from the blinding glow.

With a flash of light and the screech of rent metal, everything disappeared before them…


	8. Chapter 7

_Unknown location, unknown time_

Edward woke to the smell of smoke and dust and the chill of ice-cold metal against his bare skin, or so it felt. Raising his hand to his face, he rubbed his eyes open. Before he opened his eyes, however, he listened.

A sound, something he knew he’d never heard before almost anywhere in the Sovereignty’s orbital space station: silence.

He opened his eyes, looking down at his naked body before glancing around the room. To his surprise, the lights were out, save for the eerie blue glow cast by the lights of the Reconstruction Tube he stood in. “A power outage… were we attacked?” he thought, glancing around the room. He stepped through the energy field that protected the delicately-controlled environment of the Tube’s interior, immediately regretting his decision as he set his bare foot down on the freezing floor. “Holy shit!” he cried, leaping back into the warm interior of the Tube. “That’s not supposed to happen…”

Cautiously poking his head back out of the Tube, he looked down the length of the hall at the other banks. Only two other Tubes were receiving power from their built-in emergency power reserves. Glancing to his right, he looked down at the floor and jumped back in fright from the frozen corpse laying on the floor, the feather-like ice crystals around his body only just beginning to melt. “Fuck me… Bill?” he thought, stooping down to observe the man’s features, noticing the flash-frozen cup of dark brown liquid in his hand. “Waste of a perfectly good cup of coffee…” he muttered, shaking his head. “What the hell happened here? It’s like an airlock gave out or something…”

He heard a feminine cough from down the hall that caught his attention. Glancing to the right, he found Charlotte staring back at him, poking her head out of her own Reconstruction Tube further down the hall. “The floor’s freezing cold, Char, be careful,” he said, looking back at his frozen friend on the ground nearby. “Don’t get frostbite in your feet, ‘cuz I’m no surgeon.”

Suddenly, an idea popped into his head. “Hey, Char, take a peek to your right. Can you see the trans-mat pod?” Edward called. He watched as she poked her head out, craning her neck to try and catch a glimpse of the materials teleporter at the end of the hall. After a moment of looking around, she turned back to him and nodded silently.

“And is our stuff in there?”

She nodded once more.

“Alright. Close your eyes, I’m gonna make a run for it.”

Waiting for her to disappear back into her Reconstruction Tube pod, Edward balled up his fists and silently cursed to himself before sprinting out of his own Tube, taking bounding leaps to keep his bare feet off of the freezing steel floor. Just as she had said, the materials teleporter, or “trans-mat” system was loaded with his own suit and gear as well as Charlotte’s. Snatching up his own suit, he streaked back down to his Reconstruction Tube and stepped inside, taking a moment to hold his freezing toes in his hands to warm them up. “Thank god the data transfer for these finished before whatever the hell happened actually happened,” he thought as he undid the chestpiece of his armor and unzipped the thick fabric jumpsuit, stepping into it and hastily zipping up. Donning the rest of his armor, he could feel the frozen metal sucking the heat from his body through the thick form-fitting jumpsuit underneath, but it wasn’t long until the suit’s life support system booted up. “The heating coils should take care of that,” he thought as he strapped on the rest of his equipment to his armor.

Finished gearing up, he carried the rest of the equipment down to Charlotte, still waiting patiently in the Reconstruction Tube with her eyes closed. “Just like I’d found her six months ago,” he thought. Realizing that she was just as naked as he had been, he stepped to the side of the Tube where he couldn’t see her and held out her suit to her. “Come on, Char, get dressed. Let’s go figure this shit out before it gets worse.”

He felt the suit gently slip from his grasp as she took her outfit, leaving him to return to the trans-mat pod to fetch the rest of his gear. “Seriously glad these made it through, or I’d be in some deep shit,” he thought as he picked up the long anti-materiel rifle and the small automatic pistol from the pod, their white-colored frames cool to the touch. Attaching the submachine gun to its magnetic hardpoint against his right thigh, he gently pulled the bolt of the long rifle halfway back, reassured by the sight of the pristine cartridge waiting in the chamber. “Good, that’s what I needed to see,” he thought, pushing the bolt forward once more. It wasn’t long until Charlotte stepped out of the Tube in her infiltrator suit, her lengthy plasma rifle and satchel of gear strapped to her back.

“Now, question is,” Edward thought, “…do the doors work on emergency power?” Reaching the door at the far end of the hall, he slipped his ID keycard into the reader next to the door, but the device didn’t respond. “I guessed that would be the case…” he thought. Looking around for an alternative, his eyes came to rest on the blue lights emanating from the Reconstruction Tubes he and Charlotte had emerged from. “I guess we can steal one of the emergency battery banks from one of those, but I thought even the doors had backup power banks of their own… Yeah, that’s what we’ll do.”

Withdrawing a small multi-tool from his engineer’s pouch, he began dismantling the card reader’s housing until he was able to lift the panel completely free of the wall, revealing the thick layering of wires hidden in the metal walls. “One of these would have powered the door from a reserve bank, but maybe it was damaged…” he thought, squinting in the dimly-lit darkness as he dug around among the endless wires, looking for any signs of a broken connection.

Unable to find anything wrong with the wires, Edward looked back to Charlotte, about to ask her to give him a hand, but instead found her waiting with two wires in her hand trailing away from one of the two illuminated Reconstruction Tubes. “Didn’t waste any time on that, did you?” He joked, gratefully accepting the wires. “At this rate, I’m going to be out of a job!” Charlotte simply nodded in response, the glow of her helmet’s visor glowing in the darkness. Flipping his small multi-tool open to expose the pliers tool, he reached into the jungle of wires inside the wall and began digging through once more, until he found the wire he thought he was looking for. With a few quick snips of the pliers’ wire-cutter blades, the ends of the wire came free, their copper innards exposed.

“Here goes nothing,” he thought, holding the two live wires Charlotte had handed him up to the newly exposed wire ends. With the spark of arcing electricity between the wires, the panel of the dangling card reader came to life, blinking red with a warning message. Suddenly, the door unlocked with a mechanical click, and two slots on either panel of the thick blast door dropped down, each painted with yellow and black stripes. “Whoever developed that backup power system needs to be fired,” he thought, shaking his head in disgust. “The door doesn’t unlock if the panel loses power, which doesn’t have a local backup source? That’s as dumb as it gets.”

Placing both of his hands on the handle, he pulled hard to the left until the heavy door began to slide, fighting the stiff unpowered hydraulics with every muscle in his body. Bright light and a blast of hot, dusty wind filled the room as he pulled the door open, forcing him to shield his eyes for a moment.

Finally locking the door open, he peered outside, shielding his eyes until his visor tinted itself to spare his eyes from the pounding sunlight. Outside, beyond the shredded wreckage of the hallway just beyond the blast door, he could see a plateau-dotted desert stretch far to the horizon. Edward stepped out onto the peach-colored stony ground, looking up at the bright orange sun in the sky above. “Holy shit, that thing’s huge,” he thought, his visor dimming as much as it could to counteract the bright light filtering through his parted fingers. “Definitely isn’t Auraxis… that’s got to be a red giant, definitely not the G-class star Auraxis orbits around…”

Charlotte joined him at his side, looking around. “This definitely isn’t northern Indar, Char,” Edward said, turning to walk around the remains of the Reconstruction Tube hall. “I don’t know what happened… well, I take that back, I sorta do,” he added, stopping dead in his tracks. “Bill and Jimmy, they were frozen solid. That means all their heat radiated away, so the room must have been isolated from the space station, meaning they wouldn’t have access to power to keep the heaters running, or maybe there was an air breach... It happened too fast for them to even react, but that’s space for you. It must’ve been the artifacts in the data relay, but I’m not sure how… I tested it myself beforehand and it worked just fine for data transfer… Anyway, first thing’s first, shelter. We don’t have any food other than those flash-frozen coffee beans, and no water to speak of. Best chance of finding that,” he said, pointing toward a dusty mountain range rising high above the horizon far behind the building, “…would be in some crevice of those mountains, where a natural watershed might form. Might find some animals to hunt, too. Any other suggestions?”

Charlotte shook her head.

Edward nodded. “Alright, well, if you’ve got everything you need, then we’ll get going.”

* * *

 

“Damn, not a drop of water anywhere,” Edward thought, looking down into the valley to his left in hopes of catching sight of a glistening stream in the citrus-orange evening light. The thought that they could very well be stranded on a nearly waterless planet nagged at him in the back of his mind, but for the entire day of walking, he’d done his best to ignore it. By now, though, he couldn’t begin to ignore the dryness of his throat. “I have a grand total of two hydration chemical packs, but there’s not a chance in hell I’m using one of those yet until I hit day two,” he thought, rummaging through his armored tool pouch for the small grey airtight packets of powdered crystalline chemicals until he found them, reassuring himself. “Toss them in a bottle or other container and mix the crystals, and they react with the atmosphere to produce water, hydrogen gas, and trace amounts of chlorine for purification. The wonders of modern chemistry.”

Suddenly, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Stowing the packets in his pouch once more, he looked over to his partner, who was tapping the side of her head. Understanding her message, he stopped what he was doing and stood dead still, straining to hear whatever she might have heard.

After a few seconds of listening, he finally heard it over the breeze: the thundering stomp of a MAX suit, somewhere farther along the winding stone ravine. “Goddamn, you’ve got some good ears, Char!” he muttered quietly, giving her a thumbs-up. Hoisting the heavy rifle from his back, he took a moment to check that the scope of his rifle was ready to go before taking his next step, rifle low and at the ready as he proceeded along the gently sloped mountainside.

Hiking higher up the mountainside, it wasn’t long until he found them – rather, Charlotte pointed them out before he had even thought they were within line of sight. Just beyond her fingertip, he saw them: a pair of Terran Republic soldiers, a machine-gun-toting heavy assault trooper leading a MAX suit soldier, hiking along the bottom of the ravine some two hundred yards down the mountainside from them. They were headed in the opposite direction for some reason, toward the relatively open desert he and Charlotte had come from. “How the hell did they get here…” Edward muttered, slowly crouch-walking over to the nearest boulder for cover.

Charlotte quickly joined him at his side, shouldering her purple-tinted plasma rifle as she braced herself against the boulder. “Approach?” she asked quietly, her soft voice tainted by the buzz of the electronic speakers built into the bottom of her facemask.

“I mean, you’re the one with the cloaking suit, here, so…” Edward replied with a shrug. After a moment’s thought, however, he shook his head. “No, I take that back. Here, give me your gun,” he said, shifting his grip on his own rifle for her to take. “You’ve seen me use this thing before, I know you know how to work it. As much as I’ll be kicking myself for it a few minutes from now when they pull their guns on me, we could probably use the help, so I’m going to go talk to them. They probably realized how fucked we all are a few hours ago, I imagine, so maybe they’ll be reasonable.”

Nodding, Charlotte took his rifle, handing him her own. “Be careful,” she said.

Edward looked down at the purple, alien-looking rifle she handed him. “Hey, I helped build this thing. If I break it, I’ll fix it,” he said. Only her silent stare replied, until his lips parted into a smile at his own silly joke. “Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

Attaching the weapon to his back, he drew his auto-pistol from its hardpoint against his leg and began his trek down the mountainside, watching his opponents like a hawk as he went. “If they so much as hear a footstep, I’m wide out in the open and fucked five ways to Friday,” he thought as he jogged to the bottom of the ravine, well behind the two enemy soldiers. He could feel his heartbeat rise with every step as he slowly closed the distance between himself and the hulking MAX suit in front of him, each stomp of the heavy exosuit ringing out in the ravine like a small bomb going off. Within minutes, he was close enough to hear the two soldiers talking.

“-don’t have a fucking clue, but we need to find an open place to put up a beacon to orbital HQ and get the rest of our squad down here, so for the time being, take whatever you intend to say for the next half hour or so and shove it up your ass, private,” a female voice barked. The MAX soldier raised his exosuit’s heavy arms in a brief shrug. “Sure, captain,” the armored soldier replied with a sigh.

“A captain? Leading an individual squad? That’s not the typical order of TR chain-of-command, back when I served with them… must be some special commando squad or something,” Edward thought, quickly swapping his auto-pistol for Charlotte’s sniper rifle and gently raising it to his shoulder. Checking that the safety was off, he took cover behind a boulder and propped up his rifle against the rock, taking steady aim. Taking a deep breath, he peered down the magnified scope of the rifle and took aim at the infantry lady’s head. “Don’t move!” he called, his finger tightening on the rifle’s trigger.

Like a startled jackrabbit, the enemy captain dove for the nearest cover behind another rock as the MAX unit lumbered about, both arms raised as the soldier inside searched for the source of the voice as he slowly backpedaled away. “Come out with your hands up or your MAX unit loses his head, captain!” He called once more, tracking his aim to the stone the soldier had taken cover behind.

“Are you who they call Moses?” the lady called out from behind cover. The MAX soldier glanced back at his commanding officer in a moment of confusion, his shoulders dropping. “For fuck’s sake, cap, you’re going to get me shot again!” he called to her, his voice amplified by the speakers beneath his helmet. “Fuck off, private!” The lady replied.

“How the hell do they know my callsign?” Edward thought, tuning out the two Terran soldiers’ bickering. “Maybe they have a vendetta against me… this could get messy.” Re-focusing his aim on the MAX suit soldier, he slowly stood up from behind his own boulder, catching the armored soldier’s attention. Still holding the rifle to his shoulder with his left hand, he cautiously waved to the Terran with his right. To his relief, the MAX unit returned the wave. “So maybe it’s just the captain that hates me,” he thought.

“Well?” the lady yelled, still not daring to come out from cover. “Are you Moses, yes or no?”

“No, now get out here before I kill your squadmate!” Edward said, giving the MAX unit a thumbs-up. The MAX soldier nodded, turning to face the rocky outcropping. The soldier stomped off toward his commander, disappearing behind the rocky outcropping. “Private, what the-” Edward could hear the lady say before the screeching sound of metal on metal rang out, cutting the lady off. A few more moments passed before the MAX suit soldier stomped back out into the open, his fellow soldier hanging limply from the grips of his left arm wrapped around her torso. His mouth hanging open in surprise, Edward strapped the rifle to his back and quickly regained his composition before jogging over to the Terran soldier.

“Always wanted to do that,” the armored soldier said, extending a hand toward Edward. “The name’s Tony Smalls, and this angry cunt here is Sofia Izetta, my CO.”

“Edward Saller. I’ve heard a thing or two about a lady named Izetta, so I suppose this is the one and only?” he replied, taking the soldier’s extended hand and letting the suited soldier shake it for him, lest he break a wrist trying to resist the suit’s powerful hydraulics.

“Oh yeah, she’s a hardass who takes it out on the recruits when she doesn’t get her evening pleasure, if you catch my drift,” Tony said.

Edward shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t miss those days in the slightest. By the way, if she mentions Moses again,” he added, nodding toward the unconscious lady, “…you have my full support if you decide to knock her lights out again.”

Tony let out a short chuckle before catching his breath. “No joke, you’re who she calls Moses?” he asked. “Man, cap’s got a shit-list longer than my arm, and you’re number one, my friend. What’d you do to earn that honor?”

“Beats me. You guys found any water or food yet?”

“Yeah, found a small stream about half a mile up the ravine that drops off into some deep fuckin’ pit in the ground. You know what the hell is going on here?”

Edward shrugged. “Sorta? Let me go grab Charlotte, I’ll tell you on the way to that stream.”


	9. Chapter 8

_Unknown place, evening_

Following the heavy footsteps of Tony’s MAX suit through the winding ravines and valleys of the desert hills, Edward looked high toward the sky, the orange sunlight fading to a crimson red over the rust-stained stone crags around them. “It’s turning night already... that’s fast,” he thought, watching the clock on his helmet visor’s holographic display as he turned his gaze down to the ground ahead of him once more. Only the sound of the occasional breeze whistling through the stony valley around them penetrated the eerie silence on their hike.

“So it’s true that you used to be part of the Terran Republic?” Tony asked. He had seemed incredulous of Edward’s remarks during an earlier conversation, but now he seemed quite serious.

“Yeah, ever since the colony ships came through the wormhole, up until about the tenth year of the war, I believe,” Edward replied, glancing over to Charlotte to check that she was still with him. Aside from being her usual quiet self, her footsteps were so silent in comparison to Tony’s MAX suit that he often felt as though she had disappeared.

“Damn, you’re one stale cookie, my man,” Tony laughed. “And your girlfriend?”

Edward frowned, turning his attention forward once more. “Long story, maybe later. You?”

“Believe it or not, this is only my… fifth body?” the Terran soldier replied, a tone of uncertainty in his voice. “Yeah, somewhere around there. I was actually born on Auraxis, to a couple of Terran parents. Raised in the military, pretty much, but that never meant I was good at anything. Spent my first four lives trying out for Infiltrator certifications right out of school, pretty much flopped at that.” He stopped for a moment, looking around to get his bearings before setting off again. “My shooting was okay, but I couldn’t sneak around worth a damn, so they shipped me off to take MAX suit training instead. When my old squad leader got promoted, they split up the squad, and lo and behold, I get this angry little lady for a CO,” he added, gently holding up the unconscious soldier he held in the grip of his curled left arm. “Next thing I know, we shove off to go check out some excavation site in the mountains just south of Haven Outpost on Esamir, and you know what happens from there.”

“That was you?” Edward asked, surprised. Visions of decapitating that poor MAX soldier outside the dig site earlier that day instantly flashed back to him.

Tony raised his right hand to wave the Vanu soldier off. “Don’t worry about it, it happens. You were doing your job, I was doing mine. My question is, why the hell were you dropping in on a fight between us and the Conglomerate rebels without any backup?”

“Trying to get ourselves killed, believe it or not,” Edward replied. “That pit you were defending used to belong to us. A couple of my co-workers dug out an underground Vanu bunker with what we thought was a data relay inside. After a bit of analysis, we tried hooking it up to the Reconstruction Tubes to see if we could get rid of the bottleneck in data transmission between the genome storage database and the Tubes themselves. Turns out we weren’t entirely correct about what that Vanu tech was used for… so we’re here.”

“No shit?” Tony said. “Yeah, I overheard the higher-ups talking to Sofia here about that. They said they swept the dig site right after you guys got the first artifact out and tried to take the other two for themselves, that one of their spooks in your HQ passed them the test data you guys ran and that they planned to try and beat you guys to it. Turns out, the NC had a spook of their own among the engineer crew we brought along, and the bastard managed to trans-mat one of the artifacts and the data to some rich NC scumbag before we could put a bullet in him.”

Edward was stunned. “They got our test data that fucking fast?” he swore to himself, racking his brain for any possibilities about who could have leaked the intel. “That’s crazy… the Council hand-picked everyone on that development team. Could one of them really have done it? Or maybe there was a breach in security protocol and someone outside the team got in?” he pondered.

“Ah, here we go!” Tony exclaimed. Glancing up, Edward saw what the Terran soldier was talking about; The ravine split into two directions, one of which quickly ended in a dead end surrounded by wind-worn steep cliffs that rose up to some plateau far above. At the end of the short dead-end valley, the floor gave way to a deep circular pit that stretched more than two dozen yards across. Along the stony path up to the pit, he could see the glimmer of flowing water shimmering between the rocks.

“Damn, that’s a sight for sore eyes,” Edward said, jogging over to the rocks and pushing a few aside. Cupping his hands together, he raised a handful of water and looked it over carefully before pouring it into his mouth, taking a moment to rinse out the horrible “morning breath” taste before swallowing. “Shit, that’s better than a cup of coffee any day of the week,” he muttered, raising another handful and splashing it on his exposed lower face. Charlotte quietly knelt down next to him and pressed a button on the side of her helmet to remove her face mask to join him in drinking her fill.

Downing the last handful of water he could stomach, Edward rose to his feet and made his way over to the edge of the deep pit, peering into the abyss below. “Careful!” Tony called as Edward reached for his tool satchel, withdrawing a small waterproof emergency flare. Pulling the pin on the incendiary device, he gently tossed the flare down into the hole, watching as it illuminated the darkness around it on its way down.

“Ah, morning, cap! Wh—hey, captain, what the hell!” Tony cried. Edward spun about, instinctively reaching for his auto-pistol on his leg. Just beyond the MAX suit soldier standing with his hands in the air stood the once-unconscious captain he had been carrying, the rocket launcher that had been strapped to her back now in her arms and pointed at her armored companion. “Any of you three so much as sneeze and I blow your sorry ass back to the Tubes!” she yelled, shifting the magazine-fed rocket launcher against her shoulder. “You two, on the ground, now!” she added, pointing the launcher at the two purple-clad Sovereignty soldiers.

Raising his hands, Edward slowly dropped to his knees, casting a glance over toward Charlotte as she did the same, kneeling down. Lowering their hands, they both laid down on the stony dried riverbed, looking up at Sofia. Seeing that they complied, she turned her attention toward Tony, stepping closer toward him while spewing about how he would be punished. Suddenly, a thought clicked in Edward’s head, and he placed his head face-down against the stony ground to obscure his lips. “Charlotte, can you hear me?” he whispered, glancing over to his partner until he had her attention. “Tony’s between you and her, she can't see you. Cloak and do your thing.”

Nodding, Charlotte quietly pressed her facemask into place against her helmet until it locked into place. With a brief noise of her suit, her figure faded to almost nothingness, save for the faintest shimmer as the suit worked to distort light around her body. Turning his attention back to the launcher-wielding Terran, he pressed the palms of his hands against the ground, ready to spring at a moment’s notice.

When the captain was done chewing out Tony, she stepped away from him and glanced down at Edward, then to where Charlotte once was. She could barely utter a word of surprise before Charlotte reappeared behind her, placing a knife at her throat. “Three on one, captain. Not good odds,” Tony said, lowering his arms. “At least listen to what Edward has to say before you blow us all up.”

Sofia let out a sigh, but didn’t dare lower her rocket launcher. “I swear to god, Tony, I’m going to knock your fucking lights out for this… What do you need to say, Mr. Spandex?”

“Tony, take her guns, then we’ll talk,” Edward ordered.

Nodding, the MAX suited soldier stepped forward and detached her light machine gun and handgun from their hardpoints before gently plucking the magazine-fed rocket launcher from her hands, careful not to crush the device in his suit's steely grasp. “Sorry, captain,” he added sheepishly, wilting away from the scowl she gave him.

“Right, first thing’s first. One,” Edward said, holding up a finger, “…we’re not on Auraxis any more. I mean, I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I’m at least ninety-five percent sure. Which means, two, we don’t have backup, we don’t have anybody waiting at the Tubes for us. Hell, for all I know, there may already be some clone of us walking around on Auraxis some billion light years away.”

“So you’re saying you want my help?” Sofia asked, her hands on her hips. “Classic.”

“Not really,” Edward replied, rolling his eyes. “I’ve already been talking with Tony for a while, and we’re absolutely okay with taking your guns and supplies and leaving you for dead. I’m saying that we’re offering you a chance to come with us, if you’re so inclined.”

Sofia stood quietly, as though she were mulling over her options. Finally, she seemed to have come to a conclusion, turning hr head to glance over her shoulder at Charlotte. “Say, that’s a pretty big rifle you’ve got on your back, infiltrator. Big enough to put a put a pretty nasty hole in a MAX suit, I bet…”

Almost instantly, Edward’s heart sank into his stomach. Faster than lightning, Sofia’s hands flew to Charlotte’s wrist, yanking the knife away from her throat as she twisted his partner’s arm until she dropped the blade. Sprinting forward, he was on her in a flash, tearing her away from Charlotte and shoving her back toward Tony, who hastily dropped her confiscated weapons to grab her arms. “I’ll kill you, Moses, you fucking wh-” Her seething rage was cut short as Edward planted a heavy punch in her unarmored stomach, knocking the wind out of her lungs as she buckled inward at the blow.

Quietly, he pushed her head up and raised his helmet visor, then pushed hers up and stared her in her in her green eyes. “You touch Charlotte again, and I’ll steal Tony’s suit and rip you limb from limb, you understand me?” he muttered. “I don’t know what you have against me, but I can assure you that there’s not a single thing standing between you and a slow, painful death if you don’t put it aside right here and now. It’s your choice. Are you with us or not?”

Finally, the lightbulb went on, and Sofia’s eyes flew wide. “You’re… Moses?”

“The name’s Edward Saller. That anti-materiel rifle Charlotte’s carrying is mine. Yes, I’ve operated under the callsign ‘Moses’ before. Now, drop it before I knock you out and throw you in that pit over there.”

“How the hell could I forgive you for-”

Edward stepped back, turning his back to the Terran captain. “You heard her, Tony. Go toss her in that hole over there,” he said, gesturing toward the deep pit.

“Tony, don’t you fucking dare!” Sofia snapped, but her squad member ignored her plea. Tightening his grip on her arms, he casually lifted the captain high and began stomping over to the edge of the dark sinkhole while Edward tended to Charlotte. “Don’t worry, Captain, you won’t remember a thing,” Tony said, only half-jokingly. “We’re not on Auraxis, remember? Your memories won’t be uploaded to the database. You’ll wake up the same old perpetually pissed-off captain we all know and love, I’m sure.”

“Burn in hell, you fucking traitor,” she snarled.

Finding no significant wounds on Charlotte, Edward looked up at Tony as he reached the edge of the pit, dangling his CO over the edge like a doll in his exosuit’s iron grip. Surprisingly, however, Tony took a step back, turning toward him. “Edward, come take a look at this!” He called. Curious, he rose to his feet and trotted over, joining Tony at the pit’s edge. Down in the darkness, he could see the flare he had dropped earlier still burning, submerged deep in a pool of water at the bottom of the pit. All around it, light from the flare glistened off of the algae-crusted interior of a wide metal container, torn open by some tremendous force and submerged by the trickling flow of the rivulet of water flowing along the bottom of the dry riverbed and down the into the hole. “What’s that?” Tony asked, looking down toward the burning flare.

“Step back, no need to go for a swim if the edge gives way,” Edward said, reaching into his satchel for another flare. Waiting until Tony backpedalled away from the edge, he pulled the pin and tossed it down into the hole well away from the first flare. The flare fell for several seconds until it hit the water’s surface far below, sending up a brief wisp of steam as the blazing-hot grenade slipped below the surface. Sinking briefly, the light of the flare spread out through the murky water, illuminating the untorn surface of the metal and the large “0-5” stenciled on its surface in faded, chipped black paint. “Finally, some good news…” he thought.

“What is it?” Tony asked once more.

“A chance at survival,” Edward said, turning away from the hole. “So, Sofia, right? Make your decision now, otherwise we’ll leave you here and head on our way.”

“This chucklefuck still owes me nearly three years of PT,” she replied, nodding back toward the metal man that held her. “There’s not a chance in hell I’m letting him out of my sight until he’s court-martialed properly for insubordination.”

“Right, let her down, Tony,” the Vanu engineer said. The Terran soldier quickly complied, dropping Sofia to her feet and stepping back from his CO as she rubbed her sore forearms, bruised under his iron grip. “So what the hell’s down there?” She asked.

“Down there, nothing important,” Edward replied, shaking his head. “It’s what’s beyond there, or at least in that general direction,” he added, pointing across the hole toward the far wall of the dead-end of the ravine.

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Sofia replied, crossing her arms in annoyance.

Edward let out a frustrated sigh. “Fine, if it really bothers you that much, take a look for yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the hole’s edge. He watched her with caution as she joined him at the edge of the pit, glancing down at the large metal object submerged deep in the subterranean pool. “It’s a cargo pod of a pretty big ship, an old one, too. If I had to guess, it fell from very high up, with enough force to punch through the ground and fall into an existing cave. Pretty much every cargo ship we ever built on Earth was designed to be modular, so where there’s one segment, there could be more if they jettisoned the pods, maybe even the entire ship if they crash landed.”

“And you think it’s over there?” She said, looking up at the far wall of the canyon. “Seems pretty random to me. The ship could be anywhere, if it even landed.”

“Well, given that the far wall is vertical, which means it fell straight down after the cave roof broke, and the path leads up to this hole, it most likely came in from this direction,” Edward suggested, pointing over his shoulder toward Tony and tracing a path to the hole in front of him. “Either it detached from the ship after it crashed, meaning that the ship is behind us, or fell from the ship before it crashed, in which it would be behind the shipwreck. Given that we didn’t see it on the way here, I’d give it much higher odds that it’s ahead of us rather than behind us-”

“Well, sounds good to me,” Tony butted in. “Whichever way we go, we should get headed out before it gets totally dark, right?”

“Shut up, Tony,” Sofia snapped, “I don’t want to hear a damn word from your mouth for the next forty-eight hours.”

Edward held up a hand. “I don’t care if you don’t want to hear him, I do, and he’s right. You guys have explored more of this region than us, so if you aren’t going to play nice, Tony can take the lead. We just need to be headed…” he trailed off, looking at the compass on his visor’s HUD, “…north-northeast, preferably getting some altitude.

Stepping forward with Sofia’s weapons under one arm, Charlotte tapped the Terran captain’s shoulder to get her attention and handed them back. “Right,” Sofia said with a nod, attaching the weapons to their hardpoints on her armor. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

* * *

 

Over the hours of hiking around the ravines of the rocky desert mountains, the deep orange evening light had slowly given way to murky darkness. The group of four had managed to slowly climb higher and higher along the stony paths, their eyes scanning the horizon for any sign of their anticipated downed ship – at least, when Edward couldn’t feel Sofia’s hate-filled gaze boring into the back of his head. “We’re going to need to find a place to sleep soon… not that falling asleep anywhere near that lady is a good idea,” Edward thought, scanning the rocky ridges and mountainsides for any suitable nook to bed down. Beyond the edge of one of the mountains before him, a dim flash of light emanated from one of the distant valleys. “I didn’t just hallucinate that, did I?” He thought.

As if he’d read Edward’s mind, Tony pointed toward the distant valley. “Anyone else see that?”

“Yeah, I did,” Sofia replied. Edward nodded in agreement. Coming to a standstill, the group watched for any sign of the light’s reappearance. After a few moments, a dim corona of light flared around another mountainside. The low rumble of motors slowly began to rise over the whistle of the wind, approaching them from far away. “There’s no way they’re after us, surely…” he thought.

Suddenly, a bright flash of light appeared to cross the ravine hardly a hundred yards away as a horde of motor vehicles blazed past on some obscured path. “Well, I guess that proves we’re not alone here, wherever this is,” Tony said.

“We need to get after them and secure those vehicles,” Sofia said, pushing forward to the front of the group. “Mobility like that’s a game-changer.”

“If we can catch up to them, that is,” Edward added. “There’s clearly some road they’re following, or at least a set of tire tracks we can follow, so there’s that.”

Hiking down the hill toward where the vehicles had crossed the ravine, it soon became obvious that the cars had passed by on some improvised road, made of compacted dirt along one of the many winding dry riverbeds, its potholes packed with gravel and backfilled with mud that had long since dried into a weak clay that had baked in the desert’s blazing sun. Fresh tracks marred the dusty surface where the vehicles had roared by, heading in a northwestern direction.

“So, let’s go snatch us some wheels,” Edward said.


	10. Chapter 9

_Unknown planet, late at night_

“God, how far could these guys have gone?” Tony moaned, the heavy stomps of his suit along the ravine’s dirt road briefly drowning out his voice with every step. “We’ve been hiking for hours after the sun went down and still no luck catching up. Can’t we take a break for a moment-”

“Can it, fuckwad,” Sofia barked behind him. “We’re all just as tired as you, but those vehicles are our top priority. Besides, you’re the one with a MAX suit to carry your gear for you.”

“It has servos, yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m not fighting a half-ton battle suit just to move…” he muttered. Despite the suit’s interior padding, his legs and arms were sore and bruised from pressing up against the suit’s innards to move its steel appendages throughout the day. “Goddamn it.”

Ahead of him, he saw Charlotte quickly turn around, then grab Edward by the shoulder and spin him around. “Off the road, now!” he called, sprinting for a small dip just off the roadside. Newfound panic-driven energy filled Tony’s legs as he pushed against the heavy suit’s interior, stomping off the road and down into the ravine to take a knee. “I can’t go prone in a suit like this or I’ll never get back up,” he thought, turning his head to look down the road from the way they had came. Just as Sofia ducked down next to him, light flooded the ravine wall just a hundred or so yards away, the sound of roaring engines reverberating in the air. He bent down as low as his suit would let him as the vehicles rounded the corner, roaring down the road. “Please, don’t see me,” he silently mouthed.

With three bright flashes of passing light, the vehicles rushed past, kicking up a cloud of choking, blinding dust as they went. “Let’s go!” he could hear Edward say, spurring Tony to stand up once more. Watching as the two Vanu soldiers and his commanding officer took off down the road, he took a deep breath and fought hard against the suit, jogging off after them with thundering steps.

“I can still hear the engines,” Edward thought as he ran, small clouds of dust rising from his every step on the packed-dirt road. “That means they’ve slowed down to get around some rough terrain, or they’ve stopped.”

Following the road around a bend some one hundred yards from where they had hidden, he quickly peered around a corner, only for his eyes to widen in surprise. Before him sat the decrepit hull of a massive spaceship, a metallic shaft nearly two football fields long and thirty yards wide. Along the length of the craft, a white dust covered the ship’s surface, the light from a series of gas torches on the ground running the length of the ship accented the pitting from hundreds of years of sandblasting from the desert environment. Below the midsection of the ship, where cubic cargo pods like the one Edward had seen submerged in the underground pond dangled haphazardly from the ship by their damaged supports, a collection of rust-covered cars had gathered like some apocalyptic auto show.

“A den of them,” Sofia said, looking over the cars. “Should be easy to steal a few vehicles.”

Finally catching up to the group with his slower MAX suit, Tony stopped and stared in awe. “That’s what we’re after?” he asked, the speakers under his helmet buzzing. “It’s huge!”

“You bet,” Edward said, looking over the ship’s brick-like keel. “Old Earth ship. That’s a Colonial IDA Frigate armed transport ship. They ran alongside the colony ships two hundred and fifty years ago, carrying more sensitive or dangerous cargo the Terran Republic didn’t want any rioting civilians to get their hands on. Classified documents, mining lasers, military hardware, anything and everything that would kill you or land you in a jail cell for so much as looking at the wrong way.”

Sofia glanced over at Edward, a skeptical frown on her helmet-obscured face. “So your telling me that thing could be loaded with weapons and gear?”

Edward silently rolled his eyes and gestured to the craft in frustration. “If she ended up here at the same time we ended up in deep space not far from Auraxis after the wormhole incident, then that corroded tub of a ship has been sitting there for more than two hundred years. I’d be damned if it housed anything more than a couple dozen pipe-gun-toting shitbucket roadies and a few thoroughly irradiated cans of centuries-old Beanee Weenees,” he said. “But yes, I suppose that there’s a one in a million odds that it still has something of value in it that we could salvage…” he sighed, “so I assume that means you want to make the TR proud and run in there guns blazing, Mrs. Gung-ho Warrior?”

“Damn straight, you snarky asshole,” Sofia snapped, removing her light machine gun from the mount on her back. “Come on, Tony, on me.” Checking that the path was clear of any enemies, she sprinted out from cover, making a beeline for the nearest of the rusty cars for cover. As wistfully as he could manage through his sensor-laden steel helmet, Tony looked over toward Edward one final time before jogging to catch up with his squad leader.

Edward glanced over at Charlotte, who simply stared back at him from behind her suit’s mask with what he knew to be utter apathy. “Me, snarky? I mean, excuse me for coming to the conclusion that, with no medical supplies and limited ammunition, the idea of shooting up a downed ship full of apocalypse hobos _isn’t_ a good idea…” Charlotte only replied with a mild shrug of her shoulders, as if to say she couldn’t be bothered to care about such squabbles. “Yeah, you’re right, I sorta had it coming to me,” he added, shaking his head. “Sorry. She just drives me insane. Reminds me why I left the Republic so long ago.”

Charlotte nodded toward the two Terran soldiers, now kneeling behind the truck bed of the nearest vehicle as they scoped out the makeshift entryway into the decrepit spaceship, where a massive hole had been rent in its armored hull by the crash landing. “Yeah, I guess we should go help them, but I don’t like this one damn bit,” Edward muttered. Removing the plasma rifle from his back, he held out the weapon to his partner. “You’ll prefer this if things get hairy,” he said, gesturing for her to hand him his own anti-materiel rifle that hung slung across her back.

Nodding, she took her rifle back and exchanged it with his own, handing him the heavy bolt action. Pulling the bolt back to ensure a cartridge was seated and ready to fire, he attached the heavy rifle to his own back and drew his auto-pistol before joining the two Terran soldiers where they hid, kneeling behind the chassis of the nearest car-like vehicle.

“About time you decided to join us,” Sofia snapped.

“So, what’s the plan?” Tony asked, looking toward Edward.

Sofia glanced over at her subordinate, then slapped him over the head with the back of her armored hand, a dull clank of steel on steel ringing out in the night. “Hey, dipshit, I’m the commanding officer here. You’re under _my_ orders, with or without contact to HQ, got it? I make the plans here, not this spandex fucker.”

“Yeah, but I thought he might know the layout of the ship or something…” Tony replied, completely unfazed by his commanding officer’s backhanded blow.

Sofia looked to Edward, simultaneously annoyed and contemplating the thought that he might be useful, but the Sovereignty engineer frowned. “It’s been more than fifty years since I set foot on one of those ships, so my memory’s hazy. We’re going in at the back of the crew compartment,” he said, pointing toward the front third of the ship, forward of the cube-shaped cargo pods, “…which isn’t too terribly complex. That section where the hole in the armor is happens to be a large common space surrounded by crew quarters, so a pretty open fighting space, but who knows how these guys have set up camp in there. Anyway, that pushes right up to the second main bulkhead, which connects through to the hangar engineers’ workshops. That fills up the space between the first and second bulkhead,” he added, pointing toward the middle of the ship’s front third, then pointing toward the very front of the ship in the distance. “Forward of the first bulkhead is the actual hangar itself, just a huge empty space with lots of airlocks for moving gear in and out.”

“Any armories in there?” Sofia asked.

“That’d be on the second floor up, between the first and second bulkheads. Assuming the ship’s not powered, it would take an unholy amount of explosives to get through the blast doors to go from floor to floor, or from one section to another. To get from that armor breach to the armory, I’d guess there’s… maybe three proper blast doors plus several normal ones?”

“Uhh… what are bulkheads, again?” Tony asked.

Sofia began to turn on him, but Edward stopped her with an outstretched hand. “It’s like a firewall, a section of the hull armor that divides the ship’s interior, so if something like an asteroid punctures the hull, it doesn’t depressurize the entire inside of the ship. Damage control kind of stuff.”

“Ah, gotcha.”

Edward felt Charlotte tap on his shoulder for his attention. Glancing over at her, he found her propped up against the rear of the vehicle they were hiding behind, her plasma rifle in hand as she peered down its scope toward some distant target. “Movement,” she softly said.

Peering up over the edge of the rusted car, Edward followed her rifle’s line of sight to try to find what she was seeing, but wasn’t able to identify what might have caught her attention. “What do you see?”

“Vehicle trunk, twenty meters,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

Looking at the vehicles ahead of them, he thought he saw one of the cars shake on its stiff suspension for the briefest moment. “On it,” he replied, checking the safety on his gun. “Moving up.”

Stepping out from behind the car, Tony and Sofia stood up and began to follow him, but Edward stopped in his tracks and spun about, gesturing for them to be quiet. “Tony, we’re trying to be stealthy, here. Stay with Charlotte,” he said.

“Fine by me,” he said, taking a knee next to the purple-clad sniper once more. “You guys have fun.”

* * *

Moving from cover to cover, Edward and Sofia slowly approached the car he’d seen moving, far underneath the dilapidated ship’s hull. It wasn’t long until they were hardly ten feet away, peering over the hood of another rusted car. Just like Charlotte said, the car shook intermittently as a thumping rang out from the trunk of the vehicle. “Someone’s trapped in the trunk,” Edward muttered, slowly rising to his feet. To his surprise, a loud bang rang out from the trunk that caused him to jump in his skin. He felt Sofia grab his hand and haul him to the ground as the trunk was kicked open from the inside, denting the rusted metal.

Motioning for him to be quiet, Sofia removed the light machine gun from her back and began to rise up from her cover, but Edward pulled her back down by the shoulder, motioning for her to wait for a moment. From the open trunk, they could hear two distinct voices groaning and grunting as the occupants piled out of the vehicle, taking a moment to stretch before laughing and high-fiving each other.

“Talk about a rough ride,” one voice said, his words slightly slurred by a deep southern drawl. “Still a better night’s sleep than riding shotgun in a Harasser, though.”

“I hear ya,” the other man said, his voice deep, rich, and equally accented. “alrighty, let’s get one ’a these pile-a-shit vehicles runnin’, shall we?”

The first man laughed. “Gimme thirty seconds and I’ll have one ‘a these scrap heaps purring like a kitty,”

“Dibs on driving, though.”

“Go fuck yourself. I hotwire it, I get to drive it.”

“You, driving? Hell, Ma never even trusted your dumb ass with a shopping cart at the grocery, much less a car. I’m driving.”

Back behind the car, Sofia looked to Edward and pointed toward herself, then pointed up, then made a finger-gun. “No, let them get in the car first, then we rush them,” Edward whispered. “They’ll have their hands busy.”

He could tell that behind the dark helmet visor that covered the upper half of her face, Sofia was rolling her eyes in annoyance. It wasn’t long before the sound of a car door opening and closing rang out, spurring the two to their feet. Before the two vehicle thieves could even crank over the engine, Edward and Sofia were at the vehicle’s sides, the barrels of their guns only inches from the hands of what appeared to be two New Conglomerate soldiers.

“Hands up behind your head,” Sofia growled, careful to keep her voice down. “No sudden movements or I put a whole lot of bullets through all three of you.”

“No love lost between you two, I s’pose. Who won the bedtime argument?” The young man in the passenger seat said.

Slowly raising his hands, the man in the driver’s seat chuckled, his deep laughter reverberating from the speakers under his full-head helmet. “Well I’ll be damned… fifty years of fighting, and this is the first time I’ve ever been caught carjacking. Scratch that one off the bucket list, James,” he joked.

“What’re you smoking, Dan? I thought that list went up in flames when I crashed my first Valkyrie…”

“Shit, you’re right. Make a new one, we’ll start it again.”

“Both of you chucklefucks shut up and get out of the damn car,” Sofia snapped, yanking the door open by its rusty handle. The blue armor-clad soldiers slowly stepped out of the car, careful to keep their hands behind their heads  all the while.

“What’s your names?” Edward asked, leveling his automatic pistol at the driver’s chest.

“I’m Daniel, that’s my brother James,” the driver said, nodding toward his friend. “We found ourselves stuck out in the desert and came up on some of these rusty cars. Couldn’t get enough time with one to steal it before these other guys showed up, so we slapped a few bricks of C4 on the underside of these junkers and hitched a ride. Why ain’t ya pulled the trigger yet, spaceball?”

Edward looked toward Sofia, who didn’t dare take her eyes off of the man named James, then back toward Daniel. “Because we have an offer to make you.”


	11. Chapter 10

_Unknown planet, late at night_

“So let me get this straight…” Daniel said, seated up against the rusted vehicle he and his brother had tried to steal, his hands still behind his head and his arsenal of gear at his feet. “You spaceballs stole some Vanu tech, tried to use it, got us all fucked ‘cuz we were using your stolen test data. Now we’re stuck on some godforsaken desert planet with no access to Tubes, limited supplies, and nothing but each other. And you want us to help you go shoot up a bunch ‘a roaming bandits hiding out in that spaceship and steal their shit?”

“Unfortunately, that’s right,” Sofia said, still peering down the ironsights of her light machine gun, the weapon leveled at the blue-clad soldier’s head. Edward could tell she was still seething with anger from his unanticipated invitation for them to join the group.

“Well, I’ll be frank with y’all, that sounds like the biggest pile of horseshit, and that plan to go rob these guys sounds even worse,” Daniel replied. “I’m a doctor, so y’all can trust me when I say I’ve got twenty different meds on me that would make suicide a helluva lot more pleasant than getting stabbed by some psycho fucker with a rusty shiv and contractin’ tetanus or gangrene.”

“Thank you!” Edward said, gesturing toward Daniel and his brother while looking at Sofia. “See, I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a bad idea!”

Sofia shook her head in disgust. “Don’t you get it, dipshit? We need those supplies to get ANYWHERE! You wanna jack a vehicle and go, be my guest, but who knows how far it is to some sort of settlement where you could get food, water, or fuel for your ride. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, lowering her light machine gun, “I’m taking Tony and we’re getting inside that damn ship!” Glancing back toward where she knew Tony was hiding, she put her hands to a button on the side of her helmet to turn on her communication radio. “Alright, Tony, get your ass over here. We’re going in.”

* * *

 

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Tony asked, kneeling behind the rusted vehicle as he watched his CO and his new friend talking amongst themselves and their prisoners. Not to his surprise, the female Sovereignty sniper remained quiet and motionless, ever vigilant as she watched the events before them unfold through the scope of her plasma rifle. Bored, his gaze wandered down toward the chaingun on his left arm, then up and about the terrain until he finally found himself staring at Charlotte, looking over the alien-looking rifle she held in her arms. “That’s a beautiful rifle…” he thought out loud, looking over the teal-colored glowing heat exhausts of the dark purple rifle’s plasma core.

A muted electronic beep rang out from the comms speakers inside his suit’s helmet. “Alright, Tony, get your ass over here,” he could hear his CO say. “We’re going in.”

“Damn, just when I thought I was catching a break…” he thought as he rose to his feet, the muted whine of servo motors spinning up filling the suit once more. “Hey, I’ve gotta go meet my captain. Apparently, she still wants to go in there,” he said, looking down at Charlotte from behind his helmet’s orange-tinted “eyes”. The girl looked up at him briefly, the alien-like gaze of her helmet’s glowing face mask slits sending chills down his spine. After what seemed like an eternity, she nodded, only to return her face to the buttstock of her rifle once more.

“Creepy attitude,” he thought as he pushed forward against his suit, lumbering over toward his squad leader where she stood.

“Alright, come on,” Sofia said, jogging off through the parking lot of rusted cars toward the dimly-illuminated makeshift ramp that led up to the gaping breach in the ship’s hull. She stopped at the base of the ramp, waiting for her slow subordinate to catch up. “Alright, here’s the plan,” she began, pointing toward the top of the ramp. “I’m going to get up there, scope it out. If there’s too many for me to handle, I’ll signal you to come up. I’ll pop a flashbang, then you hose them down. Don’t go into lockdown mode, they may have explosives on hand, so retreat if they do. We can’t afford to break this suit. Any objections?”

“No objections, ma’am,” Tony recited, almost saluting from muscle memory. As much as he disliked the idea of storming the ship in the first place, he thought, “…I’m in too much hot water with the captain as is. It’d be suicide to say anything other than ‘yes ma’am’ or ‘no ma’am’.”

“Good,” Sofia replied, nodding. “Oh, and one other thing, no grenades,” she added, glancing down at the M3 Pounder grenade launcher mounted over the suit’s right arm. “We need the stuff inside to be salvageable if possible.”

Tony nodded. Silently, he watched as his squad leader carefully walked halfway up the ramp, slowing to a crawling pace as she crept silently up the rest of the way, with hardly the slightest click of metal boots on metal ramp as she went. As she neared the top of the ramp, she dropped to a crouch, getting as close as she could until she could peek her head up over the top of the ramp. Almost instantly, she ducked back down and waved toward him. “Here goes nothing…” he thought, taking a deep breath of the suit’s oily, filtered air.

Pushing forward against the heavy suit, he raised his left arm, watching as the M1 “Heavy Cycler” chaingun’s ammo count popped up on his suit’s heads-up display. With each thundering step up the metal ramp, a sensation of tension filled his heart and stuttered his motions. As he climbed closer to the top of the ramp, he took one final deep breath and pushed up to the top of the ramp. Inside the shining metal room illuminated by LED lights overhead, he could see a few dozen dirty men, their ragged clothes layered with patchworks of rusted armor. Somewhere in the room, some loud, obnoxious club music was playing through speakers whose bass woofers were blown out and buzzing. Without that, Tony suspected, you could have heard a penny drop as the occupants of the ship stared in shock.

Like a moment of calm before the storm, Tony grinned. “Sorry, guys. Wrong place, wrong time,” he thought.

A small cylindrical device skittered past his feet, landing on the ground hardly a few feet away. With a percussive blast automatically muted by his helmet’s speakers, the grenade let out a blinding blast of light that left the raiders staggering about the room. Pulling the trigger inside the suit’s left glove, the bulky gun let out a series of staccato pops that sped up as the spinning barrel spooled up, hosing his opponents with bullets as he swept the room with the weapon. Hardly a weapon was drawn by the ship’s occupants before they were mowed down by the storm of bullets, leaving behind a layer of bodies that coated the metallic floor of the room with blood.

Easing off of the trigger of the chaingun, he looked around the room until he was satisfied that the occupants had been eliminated. “Clear!” he called, still waving the spinning gun about the room at the bodies.

“Good work, soldier,” Sofia said as she breezed into the room, her light machine gun cradled in her hands. “Alright, same procedure, sweep the room for survivors, then check the adjacent rooms… looks like those Vanu fucks and the couple of rebels they spared will be joining us after all. Typical wimpy shits, skipping out on the legwork…” she added.

One by one, Tony went about the room, gently nudging the bodies of the fallen men with his heavily armored foot to check that they were dead. “Just another day at work, I guess…” he thought, a frown on his face. “Feels sorta bad knowing none of these guys will ever get up again. No Tubes for them.”

“Holy Jesus, y’all really let loose in here,” a voice said. Still jumpy from the engagement, Tony spun about as quickly as the suit would let him, raising his chaingun at the newcomer. “Whoa, there, cowboy, no need to take our heads off just yet,” Daniel said, reaching for his sidearm. “Just checkin’ yer handiwork, that’s all.”

“Gave me a heart attack,” Tony replied, resting a hand on his armored chest.

“Since you all finally showed up, you can start tossing out the bodies,” Sofia said, peering down a hallway at the back-right corner of the room with her machine gun raised. “Take what loot you can and get them out of here before it starts smelling like unwashed ass in here.”

“Somethin’ tells me she’d know all about unwashed ass,” James snickered to his brother. Sofia, whether pretending or not, didn’t seem to hear.

Stepping over the bodies, Tony stomped over to the nearest doorway, the sliding metal panels locked shut. “I would be seriously surprised if this works,” he thought, reaching down to what looked like a small card reader with buttons and a screen. Testing some of the buttons, he was unable to elicit the slightest response from the security panel. “I don’t think these doors are working, Captain,” he said, moving toward the next door. Stepping up to the next panel, he felt something crunch underneath his foot; looking down, he realized he’d stepped on one of the many corpses’ hands, nearly pulverizing it under the half-ton battle suit’s titanium-alloy foot. “Sorry,” he thought, backing away from the corpse.

“Tony, stop fucking around and move on if the doors are locked,” Sofia said though his voice comms. Looking up, he noticed that she had disappeared down the hallway she was scanning earlier. “I want you done sweeping the other hallway by the time I get back. And kill that damn music if you can find those speakers.”

“Right,” he replied, looking around the room. Underneath the bloody carnage, he found the pair of broken speakers pumping out the terrible music and swiftly put them out of their misery with a quick kick. Stepping over the corpses, he made his way to the other open doorway in the back-right corner of the room, the hallway littered with garbage all the way down to the closed door at the far end. Cautiously eyeing the few sliding-door entryways that stood open in the flickering halogen light, he raised his chaingun and let the barrels spin up before proceeding down the hallway.

Reaching the first door, he found an illuminated room lined with bunk beds built into the walls, each covered in various trashy-looking things he assumed were personal belongings of the deceased inhabitants. “Probably just a bunch of crew rooms they pried open with a crowbar or something…” he thought, briefly sweeping the room with the spinning barrels of his weapon out of habit.

Moving on to the next room, he found yet another set of crew bunks. “Probably all of them were in the main room partying or something…” he thought. Suddenly, something moved in the corner of his vision, causing him to spin around. At the end of the hallway, he saw it: a single man clad in rusty improvised armor, wielding what looked like a jury-rigged double barreled shotgun next to an open door at the end of the hallway on the left. “Don’t come any closer, demon!” the man yelled, his strangely-accented voice quivering.

“Hey, Terran guy, you alright back there?” Tony could hear Daniel call down the hall. Even from fifteen feet or so away, he could see that the man’s hands were shaking. “Hey, man, just put the gun down,” he said, taking the first few booming steps toward the man. Without warning, one of the barrels of the raider’s gun discharged, peppering Tony’s suit with hot lead – not a single pellet from the improvised weapon even left a scratch on the titanium-steel alloy armor, according to the damage indicator on his helmet’s display. Tony quickly raised his arm and replied with a volley of gunfire, plastering the man to the door until he sank to the ground in a pool of his own blood, fragments and spalling from his rusted armor littering the floor. “I wish these people would stop giving me such a scare… jeez,” he thought, trudging over to the fallen soldier where he lay. Inspecting the man proved to be useless; “just some old, bearded dude with nothing to lose, literally,” he thought, noting the man’s tattered clothes, empty pockets and shoe-less feet.

“What the hell was that ruckus all about? Damn gunfire got my trigger finger itchin,” James called from behind him. Tony turned about to see James and Daniel walking toward him, their hands hovering over the sidearms at their waists. “Some junkie try to get the drop on ya?”

A small gasp from the room on his left that the man had emerged from caught Tony’s attention. The room was completely dark, and from what little light flooded in from the hallway, he could see it was filled to the brim with crates and containers of all kinds on either side of a tight passageway. Peering into the darkness, he watched as what looked like a young boy began to peek around the crate, only to disappear as soon as he realized Tony was watching him.

“Hey there, little guy, come on out,” Tony said, doing his best to get down on one knee in the heavy battle suit. After a few more moments, the young boy peeked out once more, staring at him with a terrified gaze. “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, waving toward the child.

“Who the hell you talkin’ to?” Daniel asked, leaning in over Tony’s shoulder until he, too, spotted the child. “Well I’ll be…”

After several seconds of waving, the young boy finally stepped out into full view; hardly more than five years old, the boy looked somewhat malnourished dressed in ragged clothes much like the raiders he had just shot. To his surprise, the boy ran back into cover.

“Hey, I’m going to come back there, alright?” Tony said, calling to the boy. Pushing some of the crates aside with the strength of his suit, he forced his way toward the back of the storeroom until he found where the boy was hiding. In the dim light that filtered into the storeroom, two girls in ragged clothes sat against the wall, unconscious and chained at the wrists to a cargo-securing mount in the wall a few feet above their heads. “Oh… oh, god _damn!_ ” Tony exclaimed, kneeling down to the girls where they sat. “Captain, you read me?” he said, placing a hand on his helmet’s comms button.

“Yeah, private, loud and clear. Get scared of your own shadow again? I heard some gunfire.”

“No, one of them tried to get the jump on me so I shot him. He was hiding out in a storage room at the end of the hall. He had prisoners.”

“So?”

“A boy, maybe five or six, and two girls… one maybe twelve or thirteen, one a bit older. I think these nut-jobs were screwing kids.”

A moment of silence. It took several moments before Sofia finally responded with a solemn “on my way,” leaving Tony to his thoughts. After a moment of contemplating, he reached up to the chains where they looped around the wall’s strap mount, giving them a gentle tug to test their strength. With a swift yank, the ancient chains gave way, the links snapping as the chain slid free of the sturdy mount. “Hey, you Conglomerate guys, get back here,” he called, peeking around the boxes to wave them in.

The two New Conglomerate soldiers stepped into the room, making their way through the piles of boxes to their hiding room. “What the hell is… oh, sweet mother a’ Jesus,” Daniel let out, watching as Tony gently lifted the older of the two girls in his suit’s arms, holding her up for the men to see. “Get ‘er to the lobby, let me take a look at ‘em both in the light for wounds,” the man instructed. Reaching down, he scooped up the little boy into his arms “Up we go, bud.”

Waiting for James to pick up the other girl, the three soldiers made their way back to the main room, arriving just as Sofia returned from the other hallway. “Any others I need to know about?” she ordered.

Tony shook his head. “I passed up a few rooms to fight the guy that jumped out on me, so I dunno.”

“I’ll go check the rest. The other hallway is clear,” she said before disappearing down the left hallway.

“Alright, uhh…” Daniel said, looking around the blood-stained room. “First thing’s first, we gotta find somethin’ to put them on that ain’t covered in blood…”

“Left hallway, first room, there were some bunk beds,” Tony replied. “Follow me.”

Leading the way back down the hallway from the main common room, he stepped into the first open room on the left. Shifting his hold on the malnourished prisoner, he stepped over to the closest bunk bed on the right wall of the crew quarters and ran his hand over the ancient mattress to brush away the previous occupants’ garbage, careful not to bang up the grenade launcher mounted on top of his arm. Once the bed was free of garbage, he gently laid the girl down on the bed and stepped back, waiting for the New Conglomerate soldier to do his job.

* * *

 

On the other side of the room, Daniel sat upon a beat-up chair he had drawn up to the lowest bunk on the left side of the room, the young boy he had been carrying now standing at his side. “Lots ‘a cuts and bruises, that’s obvious, but the question is, any broken bones…” he muttered to himself. Removing his armored gauntlets, his hands began their probing over the young girl’s body, first taking her pulse at the throat and at the wrist. “Still clingin’ on for dear life. Got bigger balls ‘n most Terran soldiers to stay alive after a beating like this,” he added, chuckling softly at his own joke. Reaching into a pouch on his waist marked with a white cross within a red circle, he withdrew a small emergency flashlight and, gently raising the girl’s right eyelid with one hand, shone the light in her eye, but received no response. “Non-responsive. That confirms the low, weak heartbeat. Five to one odds they’re slippin’ ‘em pills or knockin’ ‘em out so they can’t fight back,” he said, returning the flashlight to his pouch.

“What the hell… an’ I thought we were fucked up,” James said. “So what’cha gonna do for her, Dan?”

“Until she wakes up, just basic stuff,” Daniel replied, reaching into his bag. He withdrew a hefty roll of gauze, some small self-adhesive bandages, a tube of cream, and a small bottle of pills that he rattled at his younger brother. “Antibiotic pills. Until we get home, you ain’t touchin’ my medical stash unless you want me to give you a colonoscopy with your own damn shotgun barrel,” he said, turning his attention to the young girl once more. “Make yourself useful ‘n go find where these dirty fucks’re hiding their food. They’ll need water.”

“I know!”

Surprised at the sound of a new voice, Daniel looked down at the young boy clinging to his leg, staring back up at him with a mix of energy and terror in his wide-eyed gaze. “I know!” he repeated, pointing toward the door.

Setting his supplies on the bedside, he bent down and put his hand on the young boy’s shoulder. “Hey, bud, you think you can lend my brother a hand ‘n finding us some water? That’d be mighty helpful of you.”

The young boy nodded frantically, sprinting for the door as fast as his little legs would carry him. “Come on!” he called, sprinting down the hallway toward the cargo room he had been hiding in. Watching him go, James looked back at his brother and shrugged before jogging after the child.

Watching as his younger brother left the room, Daniel returned his attention to the unconscious girl; between thirteen and fifteen, the red-headed girl looked significantly younger from systematic malnourishment that had left her as light as a feather, hardly anything more than bones and skin underneath her ragged dress. Twisting the top off of the brand-new bottle of antibiotic cream, he removed the aluminum seal and replaced the cap, squeezing a bit of the snow-white cream onto the tip of his finger. One by one, he began probing the young girl’s injuries, spreading the ointment on all but the smallest cuts to preserve what little cream he had. Only a few the largest of lacerations required gauze wrapping, focused mostly on her back from where she had been whipped. Pulling her dress back down, he moved on to rubbing antibacterial cream into the cuts on her face before stepping back from his handiwork. “I’ll probe for broken bones when she’s awake, but that’ll need to wait,” he thought, scooping up his armored gloves and medical supplies.

Turning toward the other side of the room, he found Tony down on one knee in his heavy battle suit, looking over the older girl in silence. “Hey there, big guy, you’re starin’ like you’ve never seen a girl before,” Daniel said, patting him on the shoulder as he set his gloves and supplies on the end of the bed.

“I’m just worried, you know,” the MAX-suited Terran said. “It’s Tony, by the way,” he added, extending a hand.

“Nice to meet’cha, Tony. The name’s Daniel,” the doctor replied, taking Tony’s hand and letting him shake it. “I’m a field doc, so y’all can trust me when I say I’ll get these two on their feet, ‘aight?”

Both men turned their attention back to the brown-haired girl, who looked no older than sixteen, and hardly any better off than the younger girl. “Alrighty, let’s get this show on the road, shall we?” Daniel said, dabbing the first bit of antibiotic cream on a cut on the girl’s foot. Suddenly, her eyes shot open as she scrambled back against the headboard of the bunk, reactively kicking away Daniel’s hand and sending the tube of cream flying across the room.

“Whoa, calm down, it’s okay,” Tony said, raising his hands in a gesture of peace. The older girl didn’t buy it, as she scrambled to find something to use as a weapon as she pushed herself against the back wall of the bunk, settling on a small, worn-out steel lighter she was poised to throw. With one hand, he gently reached to the release clasp on the back of his helmet and lifted the armored helmet off, revealing his face from behind the bug-eyed MAX suit mask. “We aren’t going to hurt you, alright? He’s a doctor, he just wants to help,” he said, nodding toward the New Conglomerate soldier that was preoccupied with digging through the junk littering the room’s floor to find the antibiotic cream he had lost.

Slowly, the fear in the girl’s face slipped away, replaced by confusion. “You… speak Terran?”

“Yeah! I’m a Terran Republic soldier, see?” Tony said, pointing toward an icon painted on the shoulder pads of his suit’s armor.

The girl suddenly recoiled away from him like a demon from a cross. “You… are no better than the Motorheads!” she said.

“Oh, those shitstains that were holdin’ y’all prisoner?” Daniel said, returning to the bedside with the tube of ointment. “Yeah, he shot ‘em all. As soon as we’re done here, y’all are free to get on home. What’s your name, ma’am?”

At Daniel’s words, the girl looked confused again, looking over the alien-looking New Conglomerate soldier with wary eyes, then back to Tony. “They… are… all dead? Just… like that?” She stuttered, ignoring the field medic’s question.

“Yep,” Tony said, giving her a laid-back grin. “Do me a favor and do what he says, alright? He’s a doctor, he’ll get you feeling better in no time.”

The girl finally began to relax, but her brown-eyed gaze never left Tony for a moment as Daniel worked over the cuts on her legs. “Why did you kill them?” she asked. “I thought… the Motorheads and the Terrans were working together?”

At this, Tony raised an eyebrow as he glanced over at Daniel. The helmeted soldier glanced back, but simply shrugged and returned to his work. “We’re… uh… from out of town, so to speak,” Tony said. “Why would the Terran Republic be working with people like these?”

“So the Terran Republic’s here, huh? I knew those Vanu fucks were up to no good.” Tony glanced over his shoulder, noticing Sofia standing in the doorway. “Lying through their teeth, the purple scum. Not Auraxis, my ass,” she said, stepping inside. “By the way, you two know why that other NC rebel’s snooping around the ship with that little kid? I don’t like that one bit. And where’s those damn Vanu freaks at? I found something that I need him to take a look at.”

Tony and Daniel looked at each other, then back at the angry Terran captain. “Hell if I know where them technofreaks ‘re at, but that kid thinks he knows where some water ‘n food’s at, so James’s rootin’ around them storage crates for that, I’d imagine. Prob’ly just got distracted by somethin’ shiny, I’d imagine.”

“What did you find, Cap?” Tony asked, rising to his feet. The once-muted sound of the hydraulics in his suit filled the room as he stood up, reminding him just how nice it was to have electronic noise filtering in his helmet.

Suddenly, Sofia nodded; Tony knew she had just gotten an idea in her head. “Actually, screw those Sovereignty two,” she said, stepping backwards out of the room, into the hallway. “Come with me, I’ll need your suit for a minute.”


	12. Chapter 11

Walking down the corridor to the right of the commons room, Tony secured his helmet back on his head as he went. “So what did you need me for, captain?” he asked.

Ahead, the hallway came to an abrupt left turn. Rounding the corner, Sofia pointed toward the end of the hallway, at what looked like a sealed blast door that had suffered many attempts at being forced open. “The scum that were squatting here wanted to get this door open, and so do I. That’s on you,” she said, gesturing toward the soot-covered blast door. “I’m guessing a round or two from that grenade launcher of yours would make short work of this,” she said, glancing down at the revolver-like device mounted over his suit’s right arm. “That Vanu freak said that there’s a hangar in the front of the ship section. These doors are still sealed, so there might still be valuable hardware toward the front of the ship for us to use.”

“I’m on it,” Tony said, raising his right arm toward the distant door. “May want to clear out if you want to avoid catching any shrapnel, captain,” he added, looking back toward Sofia.

“Just hit it, private,” she growled.

Shrugging to himself, Tony leveled the grenade launcher at the door toward the end of the hallway and pulled the trigger inside the right glove of his suit. With a guttural thunk, a heavy grenade sailed down the hall, impacting the heavy door and unleashing its explosive payload in a fiery blast that sent shrapnel flying in every direction, shattering the nearby ceiling lights. “Now, let’s see…” he muttered to himself, walking forward toward the door. To his surprise, the door stood strong; not even a dent to show for his effort. “Guess they don’t call it a blast door for nothing,” he thought.

Behind him, he heard footsteps echoing down the hall. “What are you guys doing?!?” He heard Edward exclaim. The man quickly breezed past Tony, drawing his flashlight from his tool pouch as he reached the security panel next to the heavily armored doors. “…Ah, thank god you didn’t break this, or we would never get this thing open…” he muttered. Tony pushed forward against his suit, joining his friend at the sealed door.

“About time you showed up. I’ve got questions for you,” Sofia commanded, stomping past Tony up to the purple armor-clad engineer as he worked over the security panel. “You see those hostages we saved? They said there’s Terran Republic forces here. If we’re not on Auraxis, then explain that, moron.”

“Hold up,” Edward said, raising a hand as he stepped back from the security panel. “Charlotte and I just got back from using one of those rustbucket cars to haul out all of those bodies from the common room back there, so you need to fill me in. Did they say anything about these Terran forces?”

“She said they were working with these raiders somehow,” Tony offered, “and that they’re pretty hated, more than the hobo guys themselves. Not much more than that, though.”

“Then nothing changes, we’re still stranded on another planet. We’ve just got a lot of people with a lot of guns that may or may not want to kill us,” Edward said, returning his attention to the security panel as he withdrew a screwdriver handle, exchanging its cross-shaped tip with a flathead tip. Holding the screwdriver vertically on top of the case, he set the flat-head tip against a seam in the panel’s metal case that protruded from the wall. “Tony, if you could give that a good tap, that’d be great,” he said, waving the heavily-armored soldier over.

“Sure,” Tony said, stepping up to the panel. Balling up his right hand into a fist, he gave the handle of the screwdriver a quick tap. The force of the exosuit’s heavy arm drove the screwdriver clean through the metal case, parting the case along the seam cleanly as the bladed tip forced its way into the metal shell. “Thanks,” Edward said, working the screwdriver free in a wiggling motion to fully separate the case. Inside, the panel looked like a jungle of wires and circuit boards, “…although I couldn’t tell if that’s on purpose or from the crash-landing,” Tony thought as he watched the Vanu Sovereignty soldier probe over the wires with his screwdriver in curious silence.

“Better hope the power lines are still connected to this, or we’re not getting through any time soon,” Edward said as he exchanged his screwdriver for a pair of wire cutters. “Those wimpy grenades weren’t going to be anywhere near enough to get through here.”

“Wimpy?!?” Sofia exclaimed in disgust. “Bullshit, these are armor-piercing high-explos-“

“Yeah, and these are solid beta-crystal titanium-3-gold doors, nearly a meter thick of material four times harder than pure titanium,” Edward interjected cooly. “Maybe you didn’t hear me when I explained to Tony what a firewall is, but that’s the same stuff the ship is armored with, designed to withstand nuclear EMP torpedoes with over a gigaton of TNT-equivalent blast yield at point-blank range. Yes, this isn’t as thick as the ship’s hull,” he added, gesturing to the door, “…but you could fill this entire hallway with RDX-40 or whatever’s in those grenades and all you’d succeed in doing is fucking up the paint job and screwing over the electronics so bad that you wouldn’t ever have a chance of getting this door open ever again. It’s designed that way. So please, let me do my job.”

Inside his suit, Tony was happily listening to his new Vanu friend ripping his captain a new one, grinning from ear to ear. Silently watching as the scientist worked over the door’s internal wiring, a thought popped into his head. “Hey, Ed… can I call you Ed?”

Edward didn’t bother to look up from his work. “Sure, I don’t care.”

“Why does this ship still have power? I mean, batteries run out just from old age, right?”

“Yes, they discharge over time, but I suppose there are a few hypotheses for explaining that,” Edward said, interspersing his words with the muted click of his wire clippers as he worked. “One, the batteries in this thing are ridiculously large, enough to power this ship’s internal circuitry and weapons for a good long while. I could easily see the ship crash-landing with a full battery, and with no need for any of the ship’s weapons, the battery could probably last a hundred years just running the lights no problem. Two, the ship usually has backup high-efficiency solar panels mounted to the hull, connected to the ship’s batteries to power life-support functions if the ship’s disabled. Those could have been trickle-charging the ship’s batteries for the past few hundred years until these raiders took up residence, if they survived the crash. The third…”

“Yeah?”

One final, definitive snip of the wire cutters. A small noise-maker circuit in the security panel’s jungle of wiring let out a klaxon-like buzzing noise, followed by a loud *kerchunk* of a heavy lock releasing inside the silver-colored door. “We pray to god that whichever ship technician signed off on the idea of rewiring the thorium nuclear reactor that normally powers the engines, and only the engines, into the ship’s standard circuitry got enough sleep the night beforehand.”

“So we’re sitting on a nuclear bomb?”

“If the reactor’s damaged, yeah, but the ship engineers would have known that, I’m sure,” Edward said, rising to his feet as he stowed his tools back in his pouch. “I’m more worried that they’re trying to do the electrical equivalent of using thermite to toast a marshmallow. That sounds like something Terran Republic engineers would try to do, even on a good day.”

“Fuck off, our technicians aren't that bad” Sofia added, rolling her eyes.

“Hey, I used to be a TR engineer, too, so I know it’s true,” Edward laughed.

After what seemed like an eternity, the heavy blast doors slowly slid open, their ancient locks crackling with hardened grease coming loose after hundreds of years. Beyond the doorway stood a high-ceiling room packed with motionless machinery, frozen in a dust-covered state where they held wide varieties of parts that at one point had been the subject of a determined engineer’s devoted attention. Carts of tools were scattered around the room, drawers hanging open haphazardly like a child’s dresser in a messy bedroom. “Looks like someone was having fun,” Edward muttered as he stepped into the workshop, his eyes tracing the path of the catwalks around the perimeter of the second and third stories of the room in the pale blue-ish white light of the LED floodlights above, the workspaces beyond the metal paths like dark caverns that ringed the room.

“One more,” Sofia said, nodding toward the far end of the workshop where another blast door stood, next to a massive hangar door that spanned the almost the entire width of the workshop’s back wall.

Edward glanced over at the Terran captain, staring through his helmet’s visor with an eyebrow raised. “Left something in the hangar airlock?” he asked.

“A steel rod to shove up your ass. Just get the damn door open and stop pissing me off.”

Edward turned to Tony. “Okay, I’ve got to ask, how the hell do you live with this lady?” he asked. The exosuit-clad man simply held out a hand with his thumb and pinky extended in either direction and held it up to his mouth, simulating chugging a flask of alcohol.

“Figures,” Edward said, turning back to the hangar workshop in front of him. High above, he could see the half-dismantled remains of a slender jet aircraft hanging from a ceiling lift just below the third catwalk, suspended by the heavy-duty chains hooked to its airframe. “A first-generation Mosquito. Haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” he thought, looking over the vehicle’s exposed turbines where the metal plates of the jet’s once-sleek frame had been removed for servicing. The vehicle’s stubby, stick-like wings were nearly useless at low airspeeds, but that was hardly what the craft was built to do; its powerful turbines, he knew, could rotate down to allow the craft to perform vertical takeoffs, or even simply rotate downward a few degrees to compensate for the insignificant lift the wings provided at a slow cruise, but its true purpose was in high-speed pursuit. Then, the realization hit him: “You’re hoping there will be a few vehicles out in the hangar airlock we can use, aren’t you?” he asked, turning toward Sofia.

“That’s the plan, soldier. Get a move-on.”

Edward trekked across the room, weaving between the carts of tools that were strewn across his path. To his surprise, the security panel next to the door lit up as he stepped close. “Biometrics are still working. Tony must’ve only just broken that last panel right then, or maybe the squatters broke it before him...” he thought as he looked around the room. For a brief moment, he reached for the panel, ready to disassemble it, but quickly withdrew his hand in second thought.

“Is there a problem here?” Sofia demanded.

Edward looked around the room, then back to the frame of the heavy blast door. “There’s a very good chance that, since this door hasn’t gone into lockdown mode, because, you know, people didn’t try to blow their way through with explosives, that there’s going to be some self-defense mechanism if I try to tamper with it right now. I don’t know for sure, but this ship was carrying military hardware like that Mosquito, so I wouldn’t put it past them… So we preferably need a keycard.”

Sofia reluctantly nodded. “Alright, Tony, help him with that. I’m going to check on that NC rebel doctor and his shit-eating brother, make sure they aren’t screwing with those kids too much. Be back in ten.”

The two men watched as the Terran Republic captain jogged down the hall, their eyes not leaving the back of her helmet until she rounded the corner at the end of the hall. “Seriously, what a nut case,” Edward muttered, shaking his head.

“Yeah, she drives me nuts, too. Can’t even keep track of how many decks of cards she’s confiscated, even in our down time,” Tony replied. “Anyway, what are we looking for?” he added.

“A small metal keycard with a computer chip in it,” Edward said as he walked over to the nearest tool cart. “They’d have the previous owner’s picture on it, so they’ll be easy to identify once you find one. The real trick will be finding one, since most engineers kept theirs on them at all times, you know, to get around the ship…”

“And you’re sure you don’t want to try hacking your way through that door like the last one?”

Edward pulled out the drawers of the first toolbox he came across, rummaging through their contents in hopes of finding a keycard stashed by some negligent engineer. “Hey, you’re the one with a bulletproof exosuit here. If you want to have a go at that panel, be my guest, but give me time to get the hell out of the way before a bunch of automated turrets pop out of nowhere and rip you a new behind. These were heavily guarded military ships, remember, and we’re right next to the fighter launch bay, one of the easiest places for enemies to board a ship.”

Tony raised a hand in defeat. “Fair enough… hey, I had a thought for a sec there. If the keycards were with the engineers at all times, wouldn’t we be more likely to find one in the crew quarters?”

“Sure, you might find one there,” Edward agreed, shutting the last drawer as he finished with his first toolbox cart. “While you’re at it, send that NC guy my way, the one that isn’t a doctor. I think he’s a light assault, right? I thought I remember seeing the jetpack module on his back armor, so if that’s true, tell him to come check these upper levels for me,” he added, gesturing toward the catwalks high above.

“Sure, be back in a bit,” Tony said as he turned about, stomping down the hallway. It wasn’t long until even the booming footsteps of the heavy mecha-suit against the ship’s metal floors was distant and echoing, leaving Edward to his thoughts. “Now, where would a keycard be…” he thought.


	13. Chapter 12

Edward had hardly gotten through half of the toolboxes when the New Conglomerate soldier finally showed up, strolling into the room. “Hey, big boy sent me. Said you needed me?” he said.

Edward couldn’t help but smile at the man’s unusual drawl. “Yeah, I needed a bit of help,” he said, looking up from his work as the young man stepped up to him, a hand extended. “I didn’t catch your name when we met,” the NC soldier said.

The Vanu scientist took the man’s hand, giving it a quick shake as he gazed into the polarized, armored glass of the man’s full-head helmet. “The name’s Edward. James, right?”

“Yep. So, what’d you need of me?”

“Your jetpack still got fuel?”

James looked up at the catwalks around the room. “Yeah, haven’t used it since we first got here. You need me… damn, talk about some hardware!” He exclaimed, his tone suddenly like that of a giddy child as his eyes came to rest on the half-disassembled Mosquito jet-fighter hanging high above. “Think we could fix that?”

“Probably not,” Edward speculated, glancing up at the hanging fighter. “Might’ve been broken when this ship crash-landed and was chosen to be parted out for spares to keep the others running. Might’ve been undergoing upgrades when the crew left her behind for some reason. I don’t know.”

“Damn, I always wanted to fly one ‘a them Mosquitos. 'Skeeters, we called 'em,” James sighed, shaking his head in dismay. “Born ‘n raised on the NC’s Reaver fighter, you see, so I always wanted to get a taste of the other side of the coin, what with how many I’ve shot down…”

“Big fighter pilot guy, huh?” Edward remarked. “I’ve worked on just about every vehicle in the Vanu and most everything in the Terran arsenal, barring the latest stuff made after I left, maybe, but piloting never really appealed to me. Anyway, could I persuade you to look around up on those catwalks? We’re looking for a keycard to get that door open so that psychotic Terran woman doesn’t rip my head off,” he said, pointing toward the blast door. “Might be stashed in a drawer or something, so look around for me.”

“Sure, gimme a sec,” the New Conglomerate soldier, said, looking around at the catwalks. Suddenly, the small jetpack built into the back of his chest armor spurred into life, filling the room with a crackling roar and launching him skyward toward the second floor of the large workshop. Reaching the catwalk’s railing, Edward watched as he quickly hoisted himself over with a final burst of his jetpack before it shut off, the stubby exhaust nozzles dimly glowing with a dull orange heat. “Damn, where’s a light switch when you need one…” he heard James mutter.

* * *

 

After an hour of looking over the two girls for further injuries, Daniel was mentally exhausted. “Damn, didn’t realize one girl could have so much wrong with ‘er,” he thought as he finished up the crude splint on the younger, readheaded girl’s right leg as she stared up at him, her bright green eyes watching carefully. He’d tallied nearly twenty injuries between the two girls ranging from notable to serious, including a broken leg, a fractured rib, and festering wounds and scars aplenty from who knows how many beatings. He had nearly run through his entire first tube of antibacterial cream and was debating opening up his other one when he had finally bandaged up the last of their wounds. “That should do it,” he said, packing up the rest of his supplies into his medical pouch. Down the hall, he could hear Tony’s suit stomping along, the booming sounds grabbing the girls’ attention instantly.

It wasn’t long until the exo-suited soldier stepped into the doorway. He quickly detached his helmet, exposing his face; short dark-brown hair swept to one side and matted down from his heavy helmet, a bit of chin stubble, and deep brown eyes that smiled even when his lips didn’t. “Hey, guys, have you seen a keycard around here? Dunno what it would look like, but it probably has a guy’s picture on it, a computer chip, the usual stuff…”

“Nah, nothin’ like that,” Daniel replied. Grabbing a small plastic pouch from the ground, he rose to his feet and tossed it to the soldier. “My brother ‘n the kid found some ‘a them in a crate back in that storage room. Just’n case you’re hankerin’ for a little somethin’ to eat.”

Tony took a moment to read the aged black text on the package, careful not to crush the aluminum-foil bubble with his exosuit’s iron grip. “Combat MRE’s? Shit, they taste bad enough rolling off the factory floor, why would I eat one that’s two hundred something years old?”

“Hell, if you ain’t gonna eat it, toss it back,” Daniel said, waving toward himself. “These girls already had one but could use more.”

“No, please have it-” the older girl began to protest, but Daniel cut her off. “You’re skinny as a rail. When that kid gets back with more, you’re eatin’ ‘em, no excuses,” he said.

Tony tossed the packet to the older girl, still seated on the lower bunk on the right side of the room. “You heard him, doc’s orders says to eat. We could move out to the common room, if you think that’d be better.”

“Whatever you would like,” the older girl said mildly, crawling to the edge of the bed with the packaged meal in hand. Tony could see that she was wincing, the pain-numbing effects of whatever narcotic she had been drugged with by the raiders slowly waning. “Hey, need help?” he asked, extending a hand.

“Thank you,” she said, taking his hand.

Daniel gently picked up the younger girl and followed Tony and the older of the two girls out into the hallway and down toward the common room. To his surprise, the floor was covered in decrepit-looking tarpaulins, obscuring the blood stains that splattered the floor from Tony’s earlier exosuit-driven massacre. The mysterious Vanu Sovereignty lady that had been following Edward around since the engineer had caught him and his brother stealing that car was seated on a makeshift hammock the raiders had set up between two loaded crates. As far as he could tell, she seemed fully engrossed in staring at the opposite wall, not bothering to acknowledge the newcomers’ presence as he set the younger, redheaded girl down on a box before taking a seat himself on a nearby chair.

Daniel watched as Tony helped the older girl to a seat of her own before stomping over to a corner of the room, setting his helmet down at his feet. One by one, he detached the massive weapons mounted over the backs of his suit’s lower arms, setting them next to his helmet. Finally, he undid the suit’s armored chestplate, setting that on top of the helmet before stepping out. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the older girl looking over the young man’s black-jumpsuit-clad body, her eyes coming to rest on the Terran Republic logo sewn into the heavily padded suit’s shoulder. “That suit is huge!” She began. “I am-”

“Surprised that there’s a normal-sized person inside, yeah,” Tony interjected. “She adds a few inches to your height, for sure,” he said, patting the shoulder of the heavy mecha-suit before taking a seat next to the girl.

“So what’s your names, y’all three,” Daniel asked, gesturing to the two girls and the Vanu infiltrator who still sat silently across from him.

“My name’s Juliet, and that’s Shanna,” the older girl said as she tore off the corner of her MRE packet, extracting a separately-packaged set of crackers wrapped in cellophane.

“This is Charlotte,” Tony added, nodding toward the silent Vanu lady. “Edward’s friend. Haven’t heard her speak a word since we met.”

From down the hallway, Daniel could hear the tapping of bare feet running along the metal hallway around the corner. Suddenly, the young boy came sprinting into the room with several more MRE packets in his arms, nearly falling over as he tried to stop himself. “I found more!” he happily exclaimed, handing the packets to Daniel.

“Thanks, bud,” he said, setting the packets on the ground next to his chair and ruffling the young boy’s short black hair. “What’s your name, bud?”

“My name’s Comere!” The young boy replied happily, only for his smile to fade to a frown. “That’s what the boss and the other adults called me.”

After a moment’s thought, Daniel let out a roaring laugh. “Naw, bud, that’s them callin’ to you, like, ‘Com’ ‘ere, ya git’,” he said, faking a ruffian accent. “Come on, didn’t your parents give ya’ a name?”

“No, my name’s Comere!” The young boy restated firmly. “Always been!”

“Really, y’all call him that?” Daniel asked, turning to the two girls.

“I, uhm… never knew his name,” Juliet replied. “He was here before I was brought here. Shanna came not long after me.”

Daniel took off his helmet, running his hand through his dirty-blond hair. “Jesus H. Christ, that’s still five kinds a’ fucked up, kidnapping babies. Hostages for something?”

Juliet nodded. “They would rob villages like mine for metal, weapons, vehicle parts… sometimes food when dealings with the Terran Republic did not work out.”

“Daniel, toss me one of those MRE’s,” Tony said. The New Conglomerate soldier reached down to the pile of prepackaged meals and tossed him one, picking up a second and ripping into the packaging to remove a small sealed tin of peas. Fishing out a small packet of chocolate candies, he extended the packet to Juliet. “What do the Terran Republic guys do here?” he asked. “Why would they be dealing with these scum?”

Glancing down at the packet, Juliet gently took them and tore open the cellophane packet, picking out a few of the small candy-shelled chocolates. “They run a large town, from what I have heard… nobody can get in, though, so they stockpile their weapons and demand tribute from other towns, occasionally bartering with the raiders if they pick a town clean before their Terran soldiers arrive.”

“Nice, so them assholes are sittin’ on the big red button and tellin’ folks to pay up or die… Sounds like the classic Terran way, right from the get-go,” Daniel said with a scowl as he popped the top on his tin of peas, folding the aluminum lid around his armor-clad finger to form a crude spoon. “They were like that even on the colony ships, my pops used to say. Nothin’ but a bunch of greedy asswipes who killed or imprisoned whoever didn’t sign their name on the dotted line when the recruiters did their rounds.”

“Yes… it is hard to survive outside their cities,” Juliet said, glancing over at Shanna, then back to Daniel. “Raiders, water and food shortages, radiation storms, sa-”

“Hold on a sec, back up there, missy,” Daniel said, eyeing the girl with a mixture of surprise and concern. “You said ‘radiation storms’, right?”

“Yes! I am surprised you don’t know about them…” she replied. “The sun here-”

“Makes people sick,” Shanna interjected quietly, looking up at doctor with nothing short of apathy. “Big flashes of light make people caught outside very sick after a few days.”

Distracted by the conversation, Daniel hadn’t noticed the sound of footsteps, now clear as day as they echoed down the metal corridor that his brother had disappeared down to help the Vanu engineer earlier. “Sounds like solar radiation, like this planet lacks an ozone layer and gets hit by radiation from solar flares,” Edward said as he stepped into the room, with Daniel’s brother and Sofia hot on his heels. “That’s why these raiders were hiding out here, protected by the radiation shielding of the ship.”

“Dan, you’ve gotta go check out that hangar!” James said, gesturing behind him with his thumb. “We got the doors to the launch deck opened up, found us a beat-up Sunderer, and some broken-down Mosquitos too!”

“Well, glad someone’s happy around here,” he said, reaching down to the pile of MREs and tossing one to his brother. “Dinner’s served. By the way, this here’s Juliet, and Shanna…” he said, gesturing to the two girls, “… and Comere, I guess,” he added, nodding to the boy.

“Well, nice to meet y’all,” James said, taking his helmet off to expose his face, ruffling his light-brown hair. “Name’s James Wilde, pleasure to meet’cha.”

Sofia stepped forward, stopping in front of Juliet. She briskly removed her helmet, letting down her long dirty-blond hair that she had kept in a tight bun underneath her helmet. “I’m Captain Sofia Izetta, Third Infantry Battallion of the Terran Republic,” she said, tucking her helmet under her right arm as she eyed the teenager with a discerning gaze. “You said you know about some Terran forces nearby, might have been dealing with these raiders?”

Juliet looked up at the demanding lady timidly. “I, uhm…”

“Come on, spit it out.”

“Hey, captain, ease up,” Tony said. “She’s had a rough day, give her some space. Grab an MRE and relax for a bit, we can figure that crap out tomorrow. Sun’s been down for ages, we could all use some sleep-”

“Shut it, private,” Sofia snapped, glancing over at her subordinate for a moment before returning her focus to Juliet. “You were saying?”

“I don’t know, I don’t even know where this place is in relation to my village, or anything…” the girl replied in dismay, looking down at her packet of candy.

“But if we got you back to your village, you could get us to the Terran forces, yes?”

“But why would you want to?!?” Juliet asked with a burst of sudden anger. “They murder and steal and leave people to die, and anyone in their right mind would want nothing to do with them!”

Sofia bent down, getting right up in Juliet’s face. “Listen here, don’t you EVER tell me what I do or don’t want,” she growled. “What I know is that the Terran Republic, no matter how twisted or corrupted, has a common goal to serve the name of the Republic and its supporters. What I also know is that they have resources that could very well get us home, and if I have to gun down every last one of their payrolled lackeys myself to get them, you can bet your anorexic ass that I’m going to do it.”

Standing upright once more, she walked over to the pile of MRE’s at Daniel’s feet and snatched one up before walking down the left-side hallway. “I’m headed to bed. Set an alarm for eight hours, then I want everyone up and working to get that Sunderer running and get us over to that girl’s village, then the Republic’s base.” The sound of metal on metal echoed into the common room as Sofia dragged one of the metal doors shut, leaving an awkward silence in her wake.

A small sniffle broke the silence as Juliet lowered her head, quietly munching on her candy. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” Tony said, patting her on the back. “She’s just scary like that to whip new recruits into shape. You’ll get used to it. Here, I’ve got something that’ll make you feel better, one sec.”

Tony hopped up from his seat and walked over to his MAX suit where it stood, reaching up into the right shoulderpad. After a brief moment of fishing around, he removed a rectangular chunk of foam padding bordered by Velcro, as well as a smaller metal tin. Replacing the padding over the hidden compartment, he repeated the process for the other shoulder, removing a slightly larger, gently curved metal flask. “Let’s play a game,” he said, popping the lid on the first tin as he took his seat once more, revealing a deck of cards, gently weathered from hundreds of games. “I can teach you blackjack, poker, solitaire, ‘Egyptian War’, you name it!”

“Hey, uh, is that…?” James asked, eyeing the flask that Tony held in his other hand.

Briefly glancing at the New Conglomerate soldier, Tony tossed him the flask. “Just don’t chug it all in one sitting. If we’re really stuck here, then that’s gotta last me until we go clean these rogue Terrans out, if they haven’t drank all their stocks already.”

James cautiously unscrewed the lid of the flask, sniffing at its contents. Suddenly, his eyes went wide with glee as he lifted the bottle to his lips and took a swig. “Thank god, liquid gold!” he exclaimed, wiping his mouth with the back of his free hand. “That’s some great whiskey! How the hell’d you get your hands on this stuff?”

“A few gambling debts, a few IOU’s, a few pulled strings,” Tony said with a sly grin as he slipped the cards out of their metal container, shuffling them with practiced haste. “Care to play a round of Terran Hold ‘Em so I can teach her?” he asked, nodding toward Juliet, then Shanna. “How about you, Edward? Charlotte?” he added, looking over at the two purple-clad soldiers.

“Thanks, but I probably should go put in a bit of work on this Sunderer before I hit the sack, if we’re headed anywhere any time soon” Edward said, shaking his head. “James, if you wanna stay, I’d still like you to come give me a hand tomorrow morning, alright?”

“Sure thing, partner,” James said as he took a seat on the floor in front of Tony, turning to toss the flask to his older brother before taking the cards that the Terran soldier offered him. “Come on, Dan, I bet I’ll beat your ass two outta the first three hands!”

“You’re on, dipshit,” Daniel retorted as he took a quick swig of the flask of whiskey and drew up his chair, capping the flask and setting it aside before turning about to pull up Shanna’s seat so she could play.

“Alright, that should be enough,” Tony said as he dealt out two cards to everyone. Looking up from the deck of cards, he glanced about the room, noticing that Charlotte had disappeared. “Well, looks like Charlotte’s in for the night, anyway,” he said, turning back to the cards. “Now, let’s get started!”


	14. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13:**

Tony woke to the sound of yelling, echoing down the distant hallways that registered as nothing more than incoherent sounds among his sleepy thoughts. Rubbing his eyes, he propped himself up on his elbows before fully sitting up, rolling off the cot he’d commandeered after a night of card games and liquor. Dusting off the backside of his black, padded under-armor jumpsuit, he glanced over at James, who was still asleep on the bunk opposite his, before poking his head out into the hallway.

From all the way down the hall, past the common room and down the hallway toward the hangar, he could hear Edward and Sofia verbally butting heads over something or other. Curious, he jogged out into the common room, stopping to snag another MRE packet and one of many small metal flasks labeled “water” in faded black ink “Sure glad Comere found these supplies, or we’d be in a deep hole,” Tony thought as he continued down the other hallway toward the hangar, unscrewing the lid on the flask and taking a deep swig of water to wash away his nasty morning breath. Re-sealing the flask and sticking it in halfway into a pocket on his jumpsuit, he tore open the MRE pack and fished out what looked like small salted pretzels, immaculately preserved “…by god knows how many chemicals that’ll probably kill me before this body turns thirty,” he thought.

As he stepped into the hangar workshop, Tony could see Edward and Charlotte standing before Sofia, with Daniel standing between them, all without their weapons strapped to their back much to his surprise. All eyes turned to the Terran recruit in awkward silence, with only the sound of his pretzel-munching filling the dead-silent workspace. “What, I was hungry!” Tony joked, holding up the cellophane-wrapped pretzels for the others to see. “Did I miss anything?”

“Naw, not much,” Daniel sighed, stepping back to greet Tony with a nod. “We’re trying to figure out what to do. Ed wants to stay and search the ship a little bit longer, Sofia wants to get the hell outta’ Dodge now that the Sunderer’s fixed up. Also, have ya’ seen my little brother?”

“Still sleeping,” Tony replied as he popped another pretzel into his mouth, his gaze wandering off toward the open door on the other side of the workshop. “I’m gonna go take a peek at that old battle bus, if you don’t mind. It’s through here, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, it is,” Edward said. “I’ll be there in a bit, if you want to give me a hand with it.”

Curious, Tony swapped the bag of pretzels for the flask of water in his pocket as he continued on through the workshop, stepping out into the hangar. Across the cavernous launch bay, the massive hangar doors were open, allowing blazing-bright sunlight to illuminate the hangar. Not too far from the door, he spotted it: amidst a few broken down vehicle chassis and piles of salvaged parts, a single Sunderer stood.

As he approached the hulking vehicle, he could see just how worse-for-wear the vehicle was; the classic red, grey, and black Terran Republic paint job was faded and scathed from long trips across the dusty, sun-beaten terrain. The tires, much to his surprise, still retained much of their tread despite the rubber pads looking aged beyond repair.

As aged as it was, Tony couldn’t find a speck of rust on the ancient vehicle as he strolled around the vehicle, pausing to pull open the back doors. “Really not a lot of water around here to rust anything, I guess…” he thought as he looked over the dimly-lit interior, noticing the two sets of dusty controls for what would have been top-mounted armaments. Stepping back, he noticed that the vehicle did, in fact, still retain what looked like a sort of light machine gun toward the rear of the craft, and a large-bore, long-barreled rifle of some sort toward the front. “Huh, don’t recognize those model,” he thought.

“Like what you see?” Edward’s voice called out. Tony glanced over his shoulder, watching as Edward and Charlotte approached. “Yeah, but I don’t recognize that,” he said, nodding toward the roof-mounted machine gun.

“Yeah, that intrigued me, too,” Edward replied, glancing up at the roof-mounted weapons. “The back gun is a predecessor to the M20 Basilisk. I was actually trained on one of those in my early Terran days. That front gun, though, is totally new to me, which was a big surprise. I was digging around in the vehicle’s ammo stores and found what looked like little rockets…”

Edward walked over to the side of the vehicle and inserted a finger into a small socket, lifting out two flat-folding handles that he used to pull open a storage compartment, with some difficulty. Inside, two links of ammunition protruded from ammo canisters built into the side-walls of the shallow compartment – massive ammo reserves that ran almost the length of the vehicle’s sides, Tony remembered from basic training. One of the links held cartridges that were significantly larger than the other.

Tony watched as Edward gently pried out one of the larger cartridges from the feed links. To him, it looked almost like a normal grenade round, something he might load into his forty-millimeter M3 Pounder he carried on the arm of his MAX suit, but a bit larger in size. “See these bands here?” Edward said, holding up the shell to where the Terran soldier could see it, tapping on a pair of colored bands about the projectile’s protruding head with his finger. “These are the same markings used on anti-tank warheads for the Prowler’s guns, at least back in the day anyway. Dunno if that’s changed…”

“But it’s belt-fed from the ammo canisters, so it’s sorta like an MR1 Fracture we use on our MAX suits, or the MR11 Gatekeeper that’s based on it that we use on the Harrasser attack cars,” Tony offered.

Edward looked up from the warhead with a curious glance. “You mean those double-barreled things I’ve seen Terran MAXes using?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Long-range compact missiles, dumb-fire version of the T2 Striker for MAX suits. Pretty recent invention, definitely wasn’t around when I first signed up for the war.”

“I thought so. The Vanu Sovereignty has had documents on it as with most other gear in the TR and New Conglomerate arsenal for quite a while, but never the actual field name for it. Good to know,” Edward said as he slid the large cartridge back into the ammo feed belt of the Sunderer, pulling the heavy armored doors shut and pressing the handles back into place.

“You Vanu guys just have your fingers in everyone’s pie, don’t you?” Tony remarked.

“Hey, ever heard of the saying ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’?” Edward replied as he walked around toward the front of the vehicle. “Knowing everything about your enemy and keeping them from knowing anything about you is how you win wars.”

“Then why haven’t you won yet?”

Tony turned around, locking eyes with his captain as she leaned up against the wide doorframe at the back of the hangar, arms crossed. “Don’t believe everything he says, rookie. He’s just recruiting for an easy brainwash victim to join in on his buddies’ little purple spandex fetish club they call the Sovereignty.”

Edward peeked out from behind the Sunderer, now pointing a wrench at the Terran lady. “Hey, nanoweave is still leagues better than that matrix steel plate armor crap you guys wear, so don’t give me that shit!” He quickly returned to his work, undoing the fasteners on the front grille of the Sunderer until he could successfully pry it loose from its mount, leaning it up against the front bumper.

Tony trotted around to the front of the vehicle, watching as Edward stooped down to poke his head into the machine, peering around. “This thing should still run in its current state, after the repairs James and I did last night, but there’s a lot of worn-out parts in here that would really screw the pooch if it broke on us out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t want to be driving out of here in this old gal’ until we scrounge up some spares, either from a supply room somewhere on this ship, or from the horde of cars outside.”

A wave of chills overtook Tony as Charlotte silently slipped into his field of view, dropping down to one knee next to her partner, briefly fishing through his bag for a second, smaller penlight to better illuminate the engine bay of the Sunderer with. “God, that’s so cool, how they’re so friggin’ stealthy even in day-to-day stuff…” he thought, his gaze fixated on the masked figure’s obscured face. After a moment of thinking, it finally crossed his mind that Daniel had been in the previous room, but had yet to join everyone else in the hangar. “Where’s Daniel?” he asked, looking over his shoulder. Sure enough, the combat medic was nowhere to be found.

“He went back to the crew berths to get his brother and the kids,” Sofia said, pointing over her shoulder toward the workshop entrance behind her with her thumb. Turning toward Edward, she crossed her arms with a sigh. “Fine, I guess we’ll stay a little longer, but I want to be out of here by midday so we have at least a chance of finding these kids’ village. So, techie, how long would it take to find you these parts you need?”

“Well, mostly what we’re looking for are replacements for the rubber stuff,” Edward said, withdrawing his head from the engine bay of the Sunderer, but not before accidentally banging it on the top of the bay. “Hoses, tubing, tire patch kits, and preferably some extra cans of fluids — diesel or gasoline, or both, engine oil, brake fluid, and some extra transmission fluid just in case,” he added, rubbing the back of his head. “These Sunderers are real war-rigs, built to take a serious beating from any direction and keep on chugging, but they’re bricked pretty fast if they start losing fluids due to a leaky hose.”

“So we just go tapping some of the cars down below the ship for any and all liquids, maybe a few spare tires if any of them look large enough, then we’re out of here?” Sofia asked, raising an eyebrow. “Seems simple enough.”

“Yeah, take a look at the engine blocks of some of the cars and see if you can find any good hoses or tubing left that’s worth saving, too,” Edward said. “I’m going to see if I can get James to help me scavenge a working solar panel or two off of the top of the ship, so we have some way of recharging a battery in the field, maybe strap it to the roof and wire it into the circuits from there as a permanent addition…” he added, trailing off into thought as he glanced up at the weather-worn vehicle. “Or we might just carry a few extra battery packs we can scavenge from the cars, rigged together as a jumper pack.”

“Fine,” Sofia said, turning her back on the Sunderer as she headed for the door. “Come on, rookie, you’re giving me a hand with this.”

* * *

 

As the two Terran soldiers disappeared into the workshop once more, Edward refocused on the massive engine before him. “Right, well, there’s no obvious leaks, but I guess we should check the fluids to see what we have on our hands…” he thought aloud, reaching for a small, well-concealed pipe with a screw-on lid. Undoing the cap, he removed a long metal rod attached to the lid, carefully cupping the end of the rod with his free hand as it came free of its housing. At the end of the dipstick, a layer of dark, viscous liquid coated the flattened end of the metal rod, thick enough to cling to the rod without dripping into his open, armored palm. “Yeah, that’s going to need replacing or at least serious diluting, for sure,” he muttered, slipping the dipstick back into its tube and screwing it back into place. “These things are manual shift, so I doubt we’ll need to check transmission fluid, but sludge in the gas tank, though…”

Stowing the small wrench he had nicked from the hangar workshop in his tool pouch, he rose to his feet and looked around at the piles of salvaged parts for a large bucket, tray, or anything he could use to catch liquid. “Hey, could you help me find something to siphon the gas tank with?” He asked, stepping around Charlotte as she rose to her feet next to him. Nodding silently, she stepped over to the nearest pile of parts and began searching.

Between the piles of junk in the hangar and the tools in the workshop, it had hardly been ten minutes before Edward and Charlotte had found a few suitably large pans and containers. Nudging one of the trays under the vehicle, he removed his helmet, got down on his knees and rolled over onto his back, setting his helmet aside as he slid his way underneath the bulky vehicle with hardly an inch of clearance between his chest armor and the vehicle’s underbody. “Hey, Charlotte, go to the other side of the vehicle and get under here, you should probably see this,” he called out.

Listening to the quiet tapping of her suit’s padded soles against the metal floor, he waited until the young white-haired lady walked around to the other side of the vehicle. Laying down on her back next to the vehicle, she removed her suit’s helmet and set it aside before sliding under the vehicle, her head tilted back so she could meet his gaze. “Yes?” she asked.

At her blue-eyed gaze, Edward’s mind blanked for the briefest moment, struggling to recollect his thoughts. “Yeah, I… just wanted to show you this in case we have to do it again. There’s old gas in the tank still, see?” he said, knocking on the bottom of a large, flat, heavily armored container that hung from the vehicle’s underbelly. The hefty fuel tank rumbled, the sound of sloshing liquid emanating from deep inside the tank. “Anyway, a little piece of cool design work that’s super handy for us right now is that, because these things were designed to run on darn near every combustible liquid in existence, the designers expected there to be a lot of sludge buildup in the tank. See this crank here?”

Charlotte’s eyes followed Edward’s hand as he reached for a small gear and handle protruding from the side of the fuel tank. She let out a thoughtful “hmm” and nodded in agreement.

Edward pointed toward the bottom of the tank. “That crank operates a slider on a worm drive gear system that will scrape off and shovel out most of the sludge that builds up in the bottom of the fuel tank, once we empty out the old fuel. All we need to do is force off this locknut plug over here to drain the fuel out, then run the slider back and forth a few times, then run a little bit of the old fuel back through the system to wash out any remaining crud, then seal it back up with a fresh locknut and load up new fuel. You know, there’s a lot of cool stuff about these old Sunderers, the way they were designed,” he added, pointing toward the heavy brackets that the fuel tank was mounted to, higher up in the cluttered underbody of the vehicle. “These fuel tanks were designed with drop-free mounts and shock absorbers. When a mine goes off under the vehicle, the fuel tank had small charges in the hull that would explode, launching this heavy plate downward and exploding the fuel, sorta like reactive armor, and cause all of the blast wave to push out the sides rather than up into the vehicle-“

“Sounds like y’all’re havin’ fun,” a voice called out. Tilting his head back, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of Daniel and James over Charlotte’s shoulder, slowly meandering their way to the vehicle in his upside-down view. As they approached, he noticed Shanna step out from behind the two brothers, holding Daniel’s hand as she walked. “What’re y’all up to?”

“Just about to clean out the old fuel in this tub’s tank” Edward called. Reaching into his tool pouch, he withdrew the same wrench he had used earlier and gently slid it onto the locknut on the side of the fuel tank. “hey, Char, could I convince you to grab that tray and slide it over here?” he asked, nodding toward the fuel tank that stat beside him. Nodding, she reached across his arm and pulled the high-walled spill tray over toward the fuel tank, positioning it underneath the locknut.

Nodding in thanks, Edward cranked hard on the locknut with both hands, straining to get some torque on the ancient fastener from such an awkward position. After several attempts, the nut budged, then abruptly gave way as it loosened up. A gentle stream of dark brown liquid spewed forth, washing out a grainy dust and small chunks of substance that rattled as they fell to the pan below. Quickly withdrawing the wrench, Edward began loosening the fastener further with his hand, letting the liquid flow for several minutes while casually listening in as the two New Conglomerate soldiers walked the young girl around the vehicle, explaining some of its features as best they could.

After filling up and switching out full trays for empty ones several times, the stream of dirty fuel began to slow to a trickle. Waiting for the last few drops to filter out, Edward gently shoved the half-full tray out from underneath the vehicle and replaced it with a final empty tray, then reached up to grab ahold of the small crank on the side of the tank. With a couple tough twists of the handle, the mechanism loosened up. A steady stream of gooey, chunk-riddled slime began to push its way around the drain plug bolt and out of the hole, plopping into the tray like wet mud. “Delicious,” he muttered, watching the dark slime flow as he cranked. Soon, the mechanism reached the end of its travel, and the rivulet of slime came to an end. “Well, that should do it for now. We can run the old fuel through a shirt or some cloth to filter out any more sediment, if we need to,” he said, pushing the tray of sludge away as he screwed the locknut back into place, sealing up the tank. “Honestly, though, this thing will probably burn just about anything we put through it, so I don’t think we need to even bother.”

Crawling out from under the Sunderer, he scooped up his helmet and climbed to his feet, met by Daniel and James showing Shanna the driver’s seat and all of the controls that surrounded it. “So, what’s the final verdict?” James asked. “Is she good to go?”

“Barring a dead battery, I think she’ll crank over right here and now if we top her up,” Edward said, fitting his helmet back over his head, but not bothering to flip the visor down. “There’s still some more work to do before we head out, to make sure she doesn’t die on us in the middle of nowhere, but that’s about it.”

“What’cha have in mi-” James began, but his thought was cut short as Charlotte stepped out from behind the vehicle, her helmet under her arm as she walked up to join them. “Well I’ll be damned, she actually has a face behind that mask!” He remarked with a laugh. “Gone this entire time and I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen you without that helmet on.”

By now, everyone was looking at the white-haired lady, who was in turn staring eye-to-eye with Shanna. “Yeah, this is Charlotte. Long story, but she keeps her helmet on most of the time,” Edward said. “Anyway, I was thinking of getting you to help me salvage a solar panel from the ship’s hull and get it set up on the roof of the Sunderer so we could have some portable power. Think you could give me a hand with that?”

“Sure thing!” James said, giving him a thumbs-up. “Just tell me where they’re at and I’ll get ‘em for ya’.”


	15. Chapter 14

Sofia let go of the rusted metal hood, letting the metal sheet slam down into place and latch shut. “Fuck me, it’s worse than a summer on Indar here,” she thought, letting out a sigh as she crouched down to pick up the pair of fuel canisters she had taken from the ship’s workshop, now filled with fuel that reeked in the scorching mid-day sun. Between the mild headache from the gasoline fumes and the all-encompassing, sticky sensation of her sweat-drenched jumpsuit clinging to her body underneath her heavy armor, she felt sick to her core. “Eating two-century-old cryo-preserved MRE’s for dinner last night probably didn’t help,” she thought. Gritting her teeth, she stuffed her internal pain far into some deep corner in the back of her mind and went about her job, carrying the two heavy twenty-liter jerry cans of fuel back to a small stack of fuel cans in the shade of the massive ship, at the base of the ramp that led up into the common room they had taken over the night before.

Setting the two full cans down next to the others, she took a seat on the ramp, gazing out over the small fleet of rust-covered vehicles. At the far end of the carpool, Tony and Juliet stood up next to a vehicle they had just finished siphoning fuel from, the young girl dwarfed in size by the exosuit-clad soldier. “She’s gotten her strength back pretty quickly for just a few meals and a good night’s sleep. I’m surprised she can even carry one of these things,” she thought, watching as the young lady weaved her way through the vehicles, struggling to carry a single can at her side. “She did insist to help, though, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I didn’t appreciate it…”

Juliet approached the collection of fuel cans, setting down her contribution. Sofia could see that her hands were shaking from overexertion — she was clearly pushing herself just to help out with the already-miserable job in such heat. “Hey, come take a seat,” she said, gesturing for the girl to join her on the ramp. Juliet glanced over to her, her eyes immediately averting Sofia’s gaze. “Jeez, I’m not gonna eat you,” the captain added, rolling her eyes.

After a moment of unsure thought, Juliet joined the Terran captain on the ramp, hugging her knees close to her chest as her hands nervously played with the hem of her tattered dress. The two women sat on the ramp for several minutes before she finally dared to speak up.

“Are you… not hot in that armor?” the brown-haired girl quietly asked.

Sofia chuckled. “In these under-armor jumpsuits, you get swamp ass like you wouldn’t believe,” she said, “but it sure beats the hell out of getting sunburned or chafed by baggy clothes under your armor.” Grasping her helmet by the neck, she gently removed the hefty headpiece and set it aside, then pulled off her armored gloves and set them beside her. “Hey, I need an honest answer for this, no bullshit. Why do you hate the Terran Republic so much?” she asked, gently probing with her fabric-covered hand underneath the tight, flat-pressed bun in her hair to scratch an itch.

Only silence greeted her question. Juliet raised her head, but didn’t dare look Sofia in the eyes as she still nervously played with her dress. “The Terran Republic has always treated us poorly… even the raiders like the Motorheads can be bribed, but the Terrans always get their way...”

“So it’s true, that they holed themselves up behind some big walls and are demanding money from others?” Sofia pressed on. She reached for her belt, removing a small water flask she had taken from the supplies in the ship’s common room earlier that morning from a carabiner. Taking a sip, she could see that Juliet was watching the flask with interest, so she held out the container to her to have some.

“Thank you,” Juliet replied meekly, taking the flask and lifting it to her lips to take a small sip before continuing. “Yes, the Terrans make their rounds once every few storms to take collections. They take as much as they want, and if we don’t give them what they want, they…”

Sofia nodded. “I see where you’re going. No need to explain.”

Stretching her legs out, Juliet slowly laid back, resting her head against the warm metal ramp and placing a hand against her head. “You not feeling great?” Sofia asked. The young girl only nodded in response, setting the metal water flask aside and resting her free hand on her stomach, on top of one of the many small holes torn in her dress where one of Daniel’s bandages showed through.

“Here, one sec, let me steal one of these,” Sofia said, slowly undoing one of the gauze wraps around Juliet’s lower left leg. Folding the length of fabric several times to reduce its size, she took the metal flask and took one final swig of metallic-tasting water before pouring the rest of the container’s contents over the gauze, soaking the fabric through. Unfolding the long strip of fabric a few times, she swung the length of fabric above her head for about fifteen seconds, until the damp fabric had cooled down significantly. Folding the fabric up again, she pushed aside Juliet’s hand and set the fabric on her forehead.

“Thank you,” the girl replied, gently resting her hand on her forehead once more, pressing the damp fabric against her skin. “That feels great… I will need to remember that trick.”

“Don’t mention it,” Sofia said, laying back against the ramp and closing her eyes. “Seriously, don’t. If Tony gets word that I’m actually being nice to someone, he’ll never stop bitching. I treat my squad like my family, but he hasn’t earned that privilege yet.”

“He seems like a kind person.”

“That’s because you don’t have to teach him and hold him to any sort of standard,” the squad captain grumbled. “He’s as lazy and stupid as they come, most days. Six months he’s been in my squad, and I can count on one hand the number of days I didn’t catch him gambling or doing some jackass shit with the other recruits. Honestly, I’ll fork over my rank and a year’s paycheck if you can find any redeeming traits of his worth writing up in a report.”

Over their idle conversation, Sofia could hear Tony slowly approach in his heavy exosuit, each thundering footstep louder than the last. Cracking an eye open, she could see in the bottom edge of her vision that the soldier was carrying six full jerry cans of fuel. “Aww, come on, starting break time without me?” he said, hindered by the heavy battle suit’s limited mobility as he squatted down to drop off the fuel cans. The Terran captain simply smirked and raised one hand, middle finger extended skyward. “At least your suit has climate control,” she said. “We’re dying out here, unlike your ugly mug.”

Tony only shrugged. “Perks of the job.”

“So’s a boot to the ass, unless you go get us some more water.”

“Fine, fine,” the soldier sighed. Stomping past the two reclining women, he disappeared into the ship for several minutes before returning, free of his MAX suit and with a few metal flasks of water and a packet of candy from an MRE in his arms. He took a seat between the two at the bottom of the ramp, passing them each another water canteen before ripping a corner off of the cellophane package of candy.

“Are you just going to pick out all the best parts of our food every time you get a break, rookie?” Sofia asked, extending an open hand.

Tony held the package of candy away from her, a look of mock offense on his face. “I can’t believe you’re going to rob your own squad members for something so petty!” he exclaimed, an air of drama in his voice. Turning to Juliet, he held out the bag of candy as an offering. “I told you she’s a bully!” he “whispered”, more than loud enough for Sofia to hear as he took the girl’s hand and poured some of the small hard candies into it. Juliet smiled, giggling slightly.

“Maybe if you respected rank and rules for three fucking seconds at any point in the past six months, I’d be inclined not to bust your balls so often in front of the squad,” Sofia stated, her hand still outstretched where she lay.

Tony grinned. “What’s the magic word?”

Without even opening an eye, Sofia deftly reached for the belt about her waist with her left hand, withdrawing a red and black, oval-shaped grenade with flat ends, her thumb poised over a small button protruding from the end. “Pulling the pin in three, two, one-”

“Fine, fine, no need to kill us all,” Tony conceded, pouring as little of the package’s contents into her hand as he thought he could get away with. “Jeez, and I thought your little secret-police second in command Johann was cold… bet you wouldn’t have pulled the pin, though.”

“Try me,” Sofia said, still holding the grenade aloft as she popped the candy into her mouth. Only after Tony seemed to back down did she return the device to its slot on her chest bandolier, then reached for her fresh container of water and took a swig.

Several minutes passed in silence. Suddenly, in the distance, the sound of an engine sputtering to life filled the dead-silent air. Sofia rose to her feet, shoving her helmet back onto her head as she looked around for the source of the noise. Finally, she noticed a small dust cloud arising from the front end of the ship; to her surprise, the heavy Sunderer transport rolled out of the thin dust cloud, belching dark, smoky exhaust as it lumbered its way around the ship, toward her. “About damn time!” she thought, taking another sip of her water canteen. The brakes of the vehicle whined as the the heavy transport came to a stop just at the edge of the shadow cast by the massive spaceship above, the roaring engine clattering for a brief moment before spooling down and falling silent. The passenger-side door flew open as James hopped out of the seat, dropping to the ground. “Hell yeah, she runs fine!” he remarked, affectionately slapping the armored side of the vehicle. “This ol’ war rig’s got life in her, yet!”

“Then let’s get loaded up and get shipped out,” she said, pocketing her half-empty water flask. “The sooner we get out of this shithole and find that Terran base, the better.”

* * *

 

After about an hour, the Sunderer was loaded down with as many spare cans of fuel, MRE packets and canisters of water as they could fit in the spare troop transport seats, leaving the rest stashed away on the catwalks of the hangar workshop where no one else could reach them.

“Is that all of it?” Daniel called, setting his gauss rifle against a drink holder on the front console, climbing up into the dusty, sun-hardened driver’s seat of the Sunderer. “No stoppin’ for bathroom breaks, if we can help it. We’re in for the long haul tonight.”

Pausing to double check that she had all of her gear, Sofia looked around, making sure that everyone was present and accounted for. “That should be it… wait, no, we’re missing that damn Vanu techie. Now where the hell did he get off to…”

“Right here,” a voice called out. Turning about, Sofia found Edward and Charlotte strolling down the ramp up into the ship, holding up a keycard. “Turns out the keycard we found had pretty wide-reaching clearance. Not all of the doors had power, but Charlotte and I found a way up to the comms center. Most of the ships’ comms are fucked from the landing, but one of the distress signal modules was working, so I rigged up a little randomized timer to send out pings between two days and two weeks apart, on a very specific set of frequencies.”

“Why’d ya wanna do that?” Daniel asked, casually adjusting the rearview mirror with idle curiosity. “Don’t that mean someone’ll just find the ship ‘n leave us with more space hobos to kill?”

“Because I found a few of these in the comms deck, or to be specific, four of them,” Edward said, reaching for his belt on his backside. He withdrew four disc-shaped objects, about three inches across and bordered with a bulky age-hardened rubber case. “You’ve probably seen these things before if you ever had to do an orbital drop on a spawn beacon,” he said, tossing one to the New Conglomerate soldier through the open passenger door.

“Ah, yeah, these… not like we ever needed ‘em. Just kick down the drop pod door ‘n start shootin’, to be honest,” Daniel replied, looking over the device.

“Yeah, well, they’re basically fancy compasses that read several radio frequencies at once. Boot it up and punch in eighty-nine point six, ninety-two point three, and one-oh-seven point five,” Edward said, handing one to Sofia as she walked up to the back of the Sunderer. Booting up one of the devices with a tap of the touch screen, he gently poked at the device’s digital buttons until the three frequencies were set, then pressed a physical button on the device’s edge. With the frequencies locked in, the screen went black once more.

“Good catch,” Sofia grudgingly said, stashing the device on her grenade bandolier. “Any luck getting to the armory?”

“No, no fancy toys yet,” Edward said with a shake of his head. “That’s gonna take a lot more manpower to run around restoring power to every door, or a lot of time snaking our way through the doors that do work. We can get to that after we drop them off at their village,” he added, nodding toward Shanna, Juliet, and Comere.

“Then we head toward the Terran Republic camp,” Sofia stated, staring at Edward intently.

“Now hold up there, lady,” James objected. “Don’t think for a second you’re drivin’ all of us head-first into some Terran compound without expectin’ them to light us up like some scumbag CEO’s cigar. ‘Specially me, my brother, ‘n these two spaceballs,” he said, nodding toward the two purple-clad Vanu soldiers. He climbed up into the passenger seat next to his brother, removing his shotgun from his shoulder and setting it on top of the dashboard before leaning back in the seat, hands behind his head. “Either way we can figure that shit out once we get on the road. I just wanna get the hell outta her before someone else shows up. I can’t believe just a few dozen people are all they had in this raider gang, ya know?”

Sofia began to object, but Tony put a heavy, mechanical hand on her shoulder. “Let’s just get going, Captain,” he said.

“Fine,” Sofia grumbled.

* * *

 

The sqeaking of the ancient Sunderer’s suspension filled the roomy cabin as the vehicle bounced its way over another small pothole in the dusty trail. When the vehicle reached a straight section of road, Daniel took a moment to release the latch at the back of his head-encompassing helmet, hoping to get it off and get a sip of water. Setting the helmet aside, he immediately regretted his decision as he squinted against the harsh sunlight filtering through the vehicle’s windshield, blindly reaching for his water flask in the vehicle’s cupholder with his free hand. Against the blinding light, he could see a fork in the barren trail coming up. “Which way you wanna turn, ma’am?” he said, glancing back into the passenger area of the armored bus as he fiddled with the screw-top of his flask.

Juliet hopped up from her seat, stumbling forward until she had a hold on the headrest of the driver’s seat as she peered at the upcoming paths through squinted eyes. “Uhm… right?”

“Don’t seem too sure about that, huh?” James remarked. As he began to put his feet up on the dashboard of the vehicle, Daniel jammed his flask into the cupholder once more and punched his brother in the shoulder, a little too hard to be deemed “playful”. “Stop bein’ a dipshit for three seconds, wouldja? You couldn’t even navigate your own hand to wipe your own ass, and she’s here tryin’ to remember stuff from God knows how many years ago to get us in the right direction,” he said, pulling gently on the steering wheel of the Sunderer as he returned his focus to the road. The heavy vehicle lumbered around the turn, causing Juliet to stumble slightly as the vehicle rocked. “Sorry ‘bout that, shoulda’ asked ya to take a seat first, ma’am,” Daniel said, locking eyes with Juliet’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

“Oh, no, it’s fine, really…” Juliet said, returning to her seat between Shanna and Comere. “Why do you call me that?” she hesitantly asked.

“What, you mean ma’am?” Daniel said. After a moment of thought, he simply shrugged. “Hell, that’s just basic manners. Maybe you didn’t get none o’ that growin’ up bein’ beaten every day, but unlike them assholes, I’ve got standards.”

Blushing slightly, Juliet let out a quiet “oh” and returned to her seat between Shanna and Comere, leaving Daniel to his thoughts. Pulling the steering wheel once more, he guided the heavy vehicle around another turn in the dusty trail, leaning forward out of instinct to try and get a better view around the turn. To his right, he noticed that his brother had started digging around in the glovebox of the passenger seat, fiddling with something deep in the armored compartment. “What’cha got there?” he asked.

“Eh, I got curious ‘bout this lockbox I found at the back, here,” James replied. “It ain’t easy pickin’ locks in a movin’ Sunderer, ya know.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he sighed, scratching the back of his head.

Several minutes passed, until finally the younger brother let out a triumphant “Haha!” as he stashed his makeshift tools and promptly threw the old, now broken lock out the window. “Let’s see what we’ve got… aww, hell yeah!” he muttered, withdrawing what appeared to be a sealed letter and several plastic rectangles with protruding metal plugs and faded labels taped onto the front. “Dan, take a look! Some jackass stole a bunch ‘a briefing data cards and loaded ‘em with music, looks like!”

“Aww, thank Jesus. I was ‘bout to lose my damn mind starin’ at all this endless fuckin’ dirt and rocks with everyone else back there sleepin’,” Daniel said. “I dunno how Sam used to do it, bein’ the squad driver. Hours of silence while we were all dozin’, must’ve been hell.”

“Let’s see here…” James said, looking over the labels. “Three sets of twentieth-century rock, two for twenty-third century prog, a couple labeled country, an-”

“Ain’t even a contest,” Daniel interjected, glancing over at his brother with a grin on his lips

James raised and lowered his eyebrows, matching his brother’s smile. “Rock it is.” He selected one of the thin black rectangles, labeled “20th Cent. Rock No.1”, and pushed it into a small, well-concealed slot on the dashboard plugs-first until it clicked into place. With the buzz of ancient speakers coming to life from the roof of the vehicle, an acoustic guitar rang out as the mystery player strummed out a walking bassline, instantly rousing the passengers in the back from their sleep. Daniel couldn’t help but nod along with the music as the vocals kicked in, singing about summer and ice cream and all the pleasantries of a bygone life as the Sunderer rumbled along through the dusty ravines. 

The New Conglomerate soldier felt something small bounce off the side of his head. A small piece of pretzel landed on the dashboard, skittering off to the floor underneath James' feet. “Turn it down, asshole!” he could hear Sofia yell.

“Fine, fine… buzzkill,” he thought, reaching for the volume knob. The plucky sound of guitars faded as he rolled back the dial, stopping when the volume was suitable. Idly drumming along to the music against the steering wheel with his fingers, he shuffled about in his seat, getting comfortable for the long ride ahead. “At least it’s something.”


	16. Chapter 15

Bouncing along through the ravines under the sparse guidance of Juliet’s hazy memories, the Sunderer rolled onward into the evening. After taking a musical detour through the few country-music data cards, the group had settled on the classic rock albums once more, nodding their heads and tapping their feet to whatever played to pass the time. Throughout the trip, Juliet’s eyes never left the road, scanning for anything that might jog her memory.

“Any idea how close we are?” Edward asked, idly running his hand over his helmet sitting in his lap to rub off the dust that had accumulated on its deep-purple metallic surface.

“I’m not quite sure… sorry,” Juliet hesitantly replied. “It’s just… wait, there!” she blurted, lunging forward toward the driver’s seat to get a better look.

“Yeah, I see it,” Daniel said, shielding his eyes to get a better look. Ahead, a large barricade of boulders sat on either side of a crude pig-iron gate, pitted and greyed from decades in the harsh environment. The New Conglomerate medic lightly pressed on the brake, slowly coasting the heavy vehicle to a halt. “Is this ringin’ any bells, ma’am?” He asked, glancing over his shoulder at Juliet.

“Well, yes… no… I think?” She replied, deliberating on each word as she thought. “It’s vaguely familiar, but it’s been so long, I’m just not sure. I’m sorry…”

“Nah, don’t be,” James said, retracting his feet from the dashboard as he shut off the music, tossing the data card back in the glovebox with the others. “Looks like we’ve got company, though,” he added, watching as two figures stepped up over the wall on either side of the gate.

At James’ words, Sofia leaped up from her seat, leaning over the driver’s seat to get a look at her opponents. “Definitely not TR,” she grumbled, noting the crude firearm-shaped things they carried. “This thing got riot speakers? I’d rather get on the guns and cut ‘em down and force our way in than step out into a trap, but if we can talk to them from in here…”

“What’s this? Captain Sofia Izetta, being _reasonable_?!?” Tony declared incredulously. “I thought I’d never see the day.” Sofia promptly gave him a raised middle finger, not bothering to acknowledge her recruit otherwise.

“Look’n to me like they’re scared,” Daniel remarked as he slipped his helmet on. “Look at ‘em. You can see their rifles twitching from here. Any closer’n we’d be able to smell the piss running down their leg.” Sure enough, the two guards looked toward each other, seemingly deliberating over something as everyone in the Sunderer watched with idle curiosity. Finally, the two guards backed down below the gate walls. After about a minute, the heavy iron gates swung open.

Daniel pressed the gas, sending the Sunderer lumbering through the open gates. As they passed through, he could see the guard shacks on either side of the gate just inside the wall, the two guards in their crude, heavy metal plate armor watching as the vehicle rolled by. “Musta thought we were Terrans, rollin’ about in one ‘a their vehicles.”

Leaning over the front passenger seat, Juliet let out a gasp of excitement as the vehicle rolled down the road, diving deeper and deeper into what seemed to be a narrow chasm headed straight for the center of the earth, the light filtering down from above the high stone walls growing dimmer and dimmer. “I remember this! We’re here!” She jabbered excitedly as she waved for her two friends to join her. “Shanna, Comere, you need to see this!”

As they drove, the road began to level out, the narrow walls opening into a deep pit nearly a quarter of a mile high. All along the walls of the deep pit, stone houses and structures lined the crevices, carved into the walls and connected by a network of shoddy, scrap-metal scaffolding. Daniel pulled the Sunderer to a stop at the center of the pit near what appeared to be a wide tarpaulin spread over the ground. “What the hell…” he muttered, scanning the high walls of the pit  at the dozen or so houses he could see. “I’m guessin’ we’re bein’ watched?”

Sofia reached for the ceiling of the Sunderer, pulling down the weapon control panels from their stowage position. The screen flickered into life as she wiggled the thumb-stick, shifting the aim of the heavy machine gun on the roof of the Sunderer. “Yeah, I’ve got eyes on at least three hostiles on the ground-floor structure to our nine and at least two dozen heat signatures on thermals from the structures higher up. Rookie, get off your ass and get on that other gun already,” she stated.

“Roger that,” Tony replied instantly, stepping toward the rear of the Sunderer to pull down the second weapon control panel. As the screen flickered to life, he immediately noticed the three people Sofia had called out; zooming in on the doorway, he could see the three figures, two men and a woman, arguing amongst each other. Finally, the bigger of the two men pushed the other young man out of the shaded doorway and into the light, motioning for him to head over to where the Sunderer stood. “One’s headed this way, Cap. Seems unarmed.”

“Copy that. Rear door is clear, no visible hostiles with line-of-sight.” Sofia advised, staring intently at the screen before her. “One of you guys care to step out and talk shop with this guy?”

 “Well, I’d advise it not be either of y’all with the Terran armor or they might shoot, if the girl’s hatred for TR folks is a shared sentiment in these parts,” James said. “Not sayin’ I’m nominating myself, per se, but…”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, it’s my turn,” Edward said, hopping up from his seat. He took up his heavy rifle from the empty chair next to him and slotted it into its magnetic holster on his back, then drew his sidearm and pulled back the charging handle until he could see a fresh brass casing seated in the chamber. “Come on, Char, you’re with me. Follow me out under your cloaking, but don’t go too far in case we need to bolt. And you two, be ready on my mark,” he added, pointing toward the three children at the front of the vehicle. “If this goes south, shut the door behind me as quick as you can, got it?”

Juliet nodded, taking Shanna’s and Comere’s hands into her own for reassurance. Satisfied, Edward slipped his machine-pistol back onto its leg holster and stepped up to the back door. “Here goes nothing…” he muttered, cranking the handle on the heavy door to undo the latch. Shoving the heavy door open, he hopped down from the back of the armored vehicle, instinctively gritting his teeth as he braced for some opening shot. The sound of Charlotte’s invisible feet hitting the ground behind him, and the following silence, soothed his nerves ever so slightly as he turned to his right. A young man, perhaps in his early twenties, approached the vehicle. Edward could see that he was a far cry from the underfed children from the old spaceship wreck — while he dressed him ratty clothes, his muscles were well toned and his eyes bright, yet full of nervous anxiety as he walked toward his village’s invaders.

“Hello, S-sir!” The young man stuttered as he came to a stop about ten feet before Edward. “W-we weren’t… expecting y-your collection envoy so s-soon!”

“Uhh, right, how do I put this…” Edward said, thinking over his words carefully. _The kid, he’s either scared out of his mind, or he’s not very good at speaking english… or both, I guess_ , Edward thought. “We’re not with the Terran Republic. We’re just dropping off a few kids we saved from a raider gang. Said they were from around here.”

At Edward’s words, the boy’s jaw dropped, but he quickly took a breath and regained his composure. “Let me… speak… with our elder?” He said, holding up an open palm to signify the Vanu soldier should wait. Turning on his heels, the boy sprinted back to the dirt-walled house he had approached from. Edward watched as he skidded to a halt in the doorway, caught by the shoulders by some much taller man. After a minute of distant conversation, the boy returned, followed by a small entourage of older, armor-clad men carrying crude rifles low across their waist. Soon, Edward found himself standing toe to toe with four bulky men, heavily laden with crude armor plate that, to the scientist’s best guess, couldn’t have weight any less than fifty pounds by their looks.

After a moment of uncomfortable silence, one of the men barked some guttural sounds at Edward. The man didn’t seem as old as the other three bodyguards, but his hair was well kept, and for the briefest moment, Edward thought he could have smelled something beyond body sweat and dust — like a perfume or scented oil. _Definitely a village chief, but I’ll be damned if I understood a word he just said_ , Edward thought.

“Our elder wants… you to s-state your purpose here,” the younger man said.

Edward began to raise his hand to point at the Sunderer, but the guards were on him in a flash, guns raised. “We killed raiders,” Edward said slowly, lowering his hands once more. “Saved two girls and a boy. They are from here.”

The young man relayed Edward’s words to the elder, but was met with another round of unintelligible muttering. “The elder… does not believe you took on any raiders,” the boy said, translating slowly as the elder spoke. “He thinks you… killed Terrans. Bring many bad omens to us. Terrans will… try to recover stolen Landship. Burn our village.”

 _Fuck, this isn’t good,_ Edward thought. “May I call them?” he said, nodding toward the Sunderer.

Having the message translated, the elder nodded. Edward looked over his shoulder, eyes on the back door of the Sunderer. “Hey, Tony, bring the kids!” He called. “Go slow, I don’t feel like getting shot today!”

The Sunderer briefly shook on its suspension. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the men were visibly unnerved. After a moment, the back door opened wide. To the men’s surprise, Tony was the first to jump down, the ground shaking as he landed. Edward could physically feel tensions rising as the sound of weapons being readied rang out across the deep chasm, his heart nearly skipping a beat as he felt his head nudged forward by a gun muzzle pressed up against his neck. _FUCK, TONY, THAT WASN’T SLOW!_ Edward wanted to scream.

Behind him, he could hear one of the men cry out. Turning around, he could see beyond the barrel of the gun inches from his head that Charlotte was behind the town elder, a her plasma-knife inches from his throat and likely giving him a nasty burn. “Charlotte, stop! Don’t you fucking dare!” He barked, quickly biting his tongue as the gun barrel in his face inched ever closer.

“Wait!” a voice cried, followed by that same gibberish speech the men had spoken. Despite the searing-hot knife at his throat, the chief’s face blanched, as if a ghost had just run it’s ethereal hand down his spine. Charlotte put away her knife, stepping back from the village chief and rejoining Edward. Glancing back at the Sunderer, he could see Juliet and Shanna standing under Tony’s hulking form, almost hunched over them to shield them from the distant guns around them. “Tell them to back down! These are good people!” She tried to run forward to the armed men, but Tony was quick to grab her by the arm, careful not to pulverize her wrist in his suit’s powerful grip.

Edward could feel someone brush past him as the village chief ran to her, quickly embracing her. The young man and the leader’s bodyguards quickly joined him, wary of the hulking MAX-suit-clad soldier before them.  The translator quickly returned, bowing profusely. “Our elder would like to… apologize,” the young man said, grasping for the right words. “He wishes to welcome you fully to our village, and hopes you… will spend the evening with us as thanks.”

Edward nodded, the tension in his body slowly easing away. “Thank you. We will take you up on your offer,” he said.

 _Goddamn, that was close,_ he thought.

* * *

 

James idly looked over his shotgun as his older brother pulled the Sunderer up to the only ground-level house in the pit-bottom village, twisting the key until the engine shut down with a short-winded mechanical clatter. Leaning forward to slot the shotgun onto his back holster, he popped open the door and hopped down, happy to stretch his legs after a long afternoon of riding. “Ah, jeezus, where’s a bathroom?” he muttered, looking around as the others piled out of the vehicle. Seeing the others grouping up at the back door of the Sunderer, he took a brief moment to scratch his rear before joining up with the others. “So, silver-tongue, what’s the deal lookin’ like?” He asked, putting an arm around Edward’s shoulder. 

“The deal is, we’ve got a place to stay,” Edward replied, brushing off James’ hand, “… and I ought to knock your head off, both of you,” he added, pointing at Tony and then at Charlotte. “We’ll start with you, Char. Right moves, wrong timing. These guys had us surrounded, and if they had any shooters even half as good as your average head-up-their-ass Terran grunt, your brains would be over there,” he said, pointing off toward the far end of the chasm. “Gotta keep your wits about you.”

“And me?” Tony asked, arms crossed as best his MAX suit would let him.

“I said go slow, and you come jumping out in your MAX suit like you’re storming the damn Vanu archives! You almost got me shot!”

“Well, what did you want me to do about it? This suit is all I have.”

“Send the kids out first.”

“Like hell I would ever do that,” Tony spat. “If one of the guys surrounding us sneezed with his finger on the trigger, I’d rather it be me than them.”

Edward stood in silence, thinking over Tony’s words. “No, you’re right, better us than them. Should’ve called for Sofia to bring them out rather than you, though, so that was a lapse of judgement on my part. Fact still stands that that could’ve gone a hell of a lot smoother.”

James watched as his brother slipped the keys to the Sunderer into the pocket of his blue plate-armored trousers. “Well, I dunno ‘bout y’all, but I’d like to get outta this damn heat. We can go inside, right? Juliet’s already in there.”

“Fine by me,” Sofia grunted.

Letting the others lead the way, James followed the group into the stone-carved building, happy to be out of the brutal sunlight that had been roasting him under his armor. Inside, the room seemed bare; in one corner of the room, the five men he’d seen Edward negotiating with were waiting, standing silently as they awaited their guests. Juliet was seated in a small metal chair, her hands in her face as she cried. “Is this, uhh, a bad time?” James asked.

The translator cleared his throat. “Her parents are dead. She… asked to see them, at their old home.”

James could hear his older brother swear under his breath. “Does she still got a place to live?” Daniel asked.

Having the message translated, the elder nodded and replied in his own tongue. “The house remains empty. It is in… disrepair. Can be fixed,” the translator said.

“What about other family?” Sofia added, watching the translator with steely scrutiny. “Grandparents, cousins, that sort?”

The translator shook his head, not bothering to consult the elder. “We are a mining town. We… ration medicine. Expensive. Saved for those who are young, those who work. Very few older people.”

 _Jesus, that’s a helluva lot worse than I thought,_ James thought. _Her parents must’ve gotten sick and died some time after she was taken._ In front of him, he watched as Tony led Shanna and Comere over to Juliet’s side. “Right, well, let’s shove off and go get her settled into her old place, then stock up and shove off,” Sofia said.

“This way,” the young man said, gesturing to the back of the room. Stepping up to a pair of heavy canvas sheets hanging from the ceiling, he pushed them aside and stepped into a dimly lit cave, illuminated by a single candle mounted to the tunnel wall. Waiting until Tony could get Juliet to her feet, James followed everyone into the cave, idly watching Juliet’s long hair gently sway like a pendulum with every step. The cavern slowly curved and sloped upward, hiking upward and around the edge of the chasm. _Must’ve used these tunnels for mining, I s’pose,_ James thought, peering into the dozens of candle-lit tunnels that branched off of their current path as they walked past. Reaching another canvas cover on the left side of the spiral hallway, the translator pushed it aside and held it open for the others as they headed through.

Following the crowd, James found himself in a single-room house in general disarray. It was evident that the other villagers had salvaged the place for most anything of value; only a rickety-looking metal bedframe, likely too large to be carried out by one or two determined looters, and a few worthless odds and ends remained. A set of three wooden symbols, circles with a line running down their center, hung next to the open doorway that led outside.

“This is it, huh?” Sofia declared, looking around the meager abode. She walked through the room, pausing to observe the symbols hung next to the back door for a moment before stepping outside.

“Hardly much,” Tony added. “Where’s her parent’s old stuff?”

“We reuse everything,” the translator replied. “Given to, or taken by, other families. Not much to go around.”

“Well, shit, y’all gotta have _somethin’_ for her, right?” James said. “Her parents’ stuff is still in town, right? We just gotta bust some skulls and get it back?”

“No, please… no fighting,” Juliet said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “I will be fine, I promise.” Everyone glanced at the young girl, her eyes red and her face streaked with tears as she slowly collected herself, holding Comere’s hand with her free hand. For at least a solid minute, no one spoke up; it was apparent to James that no one knew what to say, and neither did he. Finally, though, Tony stepped up, giving her a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get it sorted out,” he said. “We have sleeping bags from the ship and plenty of food for now, so we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

“I’m sure we could get back to the ship and grab some mattresses and some of the other junk the raiders left behind tomorrow to set you up here,” Edward chimed in. “I guess in the meantime we should go unload our stuff and ask around, see what people can spare.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Daniel said. “James and I will start askin’ around for stuff while y’all unload.” The New Conglomerate soldier turned around and headed back for the tunnels. “Come on, James, we’ve got some work to do.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 16**

_Unnamed village, late evening_

Edward pulled open the back door of the Sunderer, climbing up into the armored vehicle to dig around amongst the pile of goods that had been shoveled under and on top of the spare seats. Reorganizing the stacks of MRE's, canteens of water, and other technological odds-and-ends he had salvaged from the downed ship, he was finally able to retrieve the bundled-up sleeping rolls that had been stashed under the seats. He handed a few of the compressed foam bundles down to Charlotte, then gathered up as many of the remaining rolls as he could under his arms and hopped down from the vehicle, nudging the rear doors shut with his elbows…

Something was nagging him. Charlotte hadn't spoken a word since he had scolded her and Tony for their poor performance earlier that day, which, for the most part, was hardly out of the ordinary.  _Still, though, I can't help but feel at least a little bad,_  he thought as he walked into the house next to the Sunderer, heading straight through the cloth doorway to the tunnels beyond.  _I wonder if my dad ever felt this way when he had to punish me. He never could stick to his guns when it came to making me serve any sort of sentence. I remember when I took his satellite radio out of his car and disassembled it to make a tracking module for a model rocket… he darn near yelled my ear off and sent me to my room, but showed up at the door twenty minutes later with a green apple slushie from my favorite hotdog joint down the street…_

Finally, Edward stepped off into a side-tunnel and turned to face Charlotte, clearing his throat. "Hey, Char… I'm, uhh… sorry if I was a bit harsh, earlier," he said, doing his best to keep his eyes focused on her helmet's opaque, glowing visor slits, rather than let his focus drift to the dirt below in embarrassment. "I was a bit stressed, and… I just needed to vent a bit. It probably wasn't fair of me to be so critical."

Charlotte shook her head. "It's fine," she quietly replied. "I should apologize for my mistake."

"No, don't," Edward said. He shifted his grip on the sleeping rolls under his arms. "As I said, you had the right idea. I just… I was just being overly critical, that's all. Just thought I should apologize to you and Tony when I get the chance."

Stepping back out into the hallway, the two continued up the spiral path toward the new residence they had been assigned.  _That couldn't have felt any less awkward, but I suppose it wasn't any worse than fessing up to the Council,_ Edward thought. Hiking up and around the pit village's winding tunnels, the two arrived at Juliet's new home, stepping through the curtain into the one-room house. Juliet was still sitting on the empty bed frame while Tony, now out of his MAX suit, busied himself with tidying up the odd bits of junk that had been left behind. "Hey, where's the others?" the Vanu scientist asked, looking around the room.

"Well, James and Daniel are hunting around the village for any furniture the others can spare," Tony replied, setting down a few pieces of cracked earthenware in the corner of the room along with some other junk. "Juliet sent Shanna and Comere off to go meet some of the other village kids, you know, keep them distracted and all, and Sofia was asked by the village elder to help improve the town defenses, so she's probably talking their ear off about some tactics BS or other crap," he said.

Edward nodded. "Right, sounds good. Hey, by the way, I already talked to Char about this, but I wanted to say sorry for getting angry with you earlier. I was ju-"

"Don't worry about it," Tony interrupted, dusting his hands on the thick black fabric of his MAX pilot's jumpsuit. "You get used to it after working under Sofia for so long. She'll yell at me every opportunity it gets, so what's one more voice to the choir?"

"Right, thanks for understanding," Edward said. "Anyway, we'll drop these off and then go grab some MRE's and water and bring them up for dinner. Be back in a bit."

* * *

 

Tony watched as the two Vanu Sovereignty soldiers dropped off their load of sleeping rolls before disappearing behind the curtained doorway once more.  _Might as well get those unpacked,_  he thought. He walked over and picked up the first roll, undoing the clips on the cords that held the foam rolls packed tight. Unrolling the bundle, he walked over to the bed where Juliet sat. "Hey, mind if I…?" he asked, nodding toward the bed.

"Oh, no, please," Juliet replied, hopping up from her seat. Tony flipped the roll over and laid it out on the metal bed frame, briefly smoothing out the foam rectangle as it tried to curl in upon itself. "There we go," he said, gesturing for her to take a seat. As she sat down, he walked over to the pile of remaining bedrolls and started tossing them over toward the bed. Carrying the last roll over to the bed, he took a seat and began undoing the straps.

"Tony?" Juliet said.

"What's up?"

"Why are you and the others so nice?"

Tony laughed. "That's all just perspective. You've been surrounded by a bunch of murderous, crazy people for years and now… well, actually, you're still surrounded by a bunch of murderous, crazy people, now that I think about it," he added, grinning at the thought.

"You don't look like it… I mean, yes, you killed those raiders and saved me and Shanna and Comere, but… you didn't seem like them. You, and mister Daniel, and mister Edward, and…"

Tony's smile began to fade. "Yeah, well, that's just because you don't know where we're coming from." He tossed the first bedroll down on the floor in the middle of the room and reached for the next roll.

"Where do you come from, then?" Juliet asked as she picked up a bed roll, undoing the clasps. Glancing at her, he could see that she wasn't smiling — her eyes, though, still slightly red from her earlier crying, were full of curiosity.

"Well, I'm not entirely sure, relative to here. You would have to get Ed to help you make any sense of that, I think," Tony replied, "but it was a world where we always fought. The Terran Republic, the Vanu Sovereignty, and the New Conglomerate. No one really ever died for good, so no one ever truly 'won'. If you got shot, well, you'd just be reborn in the Respawn Tubes a few days later, and, well, back to the front lines you'd go. An endless loop of violence. I probably killed at least a hundred men over my first few lives alone, so I can't even imagine Edward's kill count. Must be in the tens of thousands by now, maybe even a hundred thousand. I know a few veterans in the TR who are up there."

Juliet's eyes were wide with surprise by now. "How could you… how-"

"Because we're told to. At the end of the day, you get a paycheck that puts food on the table for you and your family, and you don't lose a wink of sleep at night, because you know that whoever you shot will be alive and kicking in just a few days."

At this, Juliet looked down at the bedroll in her lap, slowly unrolling the foam rectangle. "What was your family like?" she asked, her voice almost at a whisper.

Tony tossed another bedroll into the center of the room and reached for another. "Well… I'd rather not say, to be honest. I'll tell you some other time… actually, you know what?" He turned to the brown-haired girl, locking eyes with a slight grin as he raised two fingers in a V-shape. "I'll tell you, but on two conditions. One, you won't tell anyone else, ever. Two, you'll promise me you'll stop being so depressed and give me a smile, alright?"

After a moment's thought, Juliet nodded. "Good deal, now swear on it," Tony said, raising his right hand toward her with a pinky extended. The girl couldn't help but look at his hand with curiosity. "It's an old custom for making promises. Raise your hand like mine," he said. After a moment, she complied, allowing him to wrap his pinky around hers. "Alright, you uphold your end of the bargain and I'll do mine," he said, sliding back until he could rest his back against the wall on the other side of the bed.

"Right!" Juliet replied, joining him against the back wall. She took a moment to straighten out her dress and double-check the bow-knot in the drawstring above her chest that held her dress up before looking up at him.

"Well, first thing's first," Tony began, "I need to apologize for lying. My name's not actually Tony Smalls — at least, that's not my full first name, and that last name is a load of bull. My birth certificate would say my name is Antonio Niccolo Lombardi. Not even Sofia, my commanding officer, knows that."

"Why?" Juliet asked, astonished.

"Heh, making a beeline for the million dollar question, huh?" Tony chuckled. "Well, long story short, my family wasn't ever all that rich. Mom and dad had a hard time keeping me and my little siblings from going hungry and keeping us out of trouble. But, to make things worse, we had an uncle and an aunt living with us… well, step-aunt, if that's even a thing, really. First one had enough sense to see when the old man was becoming nothing but trouble and skipped town. Anyway, he'd badger my mom for money, sometimes even steal it, to go drinking whenever he liked. I used to work odd jobs around town to help my parents, but when that old bastard saw I was making money, he'd start coming after me, too. Beat my ass several times to steal a paycheck."

"That's terrible…" Juliet said, looking down at her hands in her lap as she idly played with the hem of her tattered sackcloth dress. "I'm sorry for asking."

"Nah, don't be," Tony said. "It's not all doom and gloom. Anyway, I got into the military because it was one of the best paying jobs at the time, since we're paid cash on top of provided food and lodging. Problem is, when they make a bank account for soldiers to store their pay, they tie our bank accounts to all of our living relatives in case, you know, some freak accident corrupts our genome data while we're being rebuilt in a Respawn Tube and kills us for good. That wouldn't work, because then my uncle could make a claim on the account, and we're back to square one. So, I used a fake name and just privately wire my money to my dad in small amounts, so they don't starve, but never have enough for my uncle to waste on booze. It's not the lavish lifestyle they deserve, but as long as they're too nice for their own good and refuse to kick my uncle out, then it's really all I can do."

"Wow," Juliet sighed, straightening out the skirt of her dress. "I never would have guessed… but why not tell miss Sofia?"

Tony shrugged. "Not her business. Even if it's not for any serious reason, fake identities can get you into deep trouble, and if anyone were to report me for that kind of shit, it would be her."

"Oh," Juliet said, tossing aside another unfurled bedroll. "How many siblings did you have?"

"Five. A brother just below me, then three sisters, and then finally a baby brother hardly a year or so old when I joined the TR Infantry Corps. Apparently my dad's not exactly a believer in birth control," Tony sighed, tossing another bedroll on the growing pile before leaning back against the wall. "I don't get much vacation time, so sometimes I wonder if they'd even recognize me nowadays… anyway, that's enough about me. Time for you to uphold your end of the bargain."

For a moment, Juliet looked confused, as if she had forgotten the agreement. Then, as she remembered, she smiled, then leaned forward and gave Tony a hug. "Thank you, Tony…" she said as he returned the embrace for a moment.

"No problem. Just remember that as dysfunctional and crazy as our little group is, we'll be glad to help," he said, letting the girl go and sliding to the front edge of the bed. He bent down and scooped up the last bedroll, undoing the clasps and tossing it on the stack without bothering to unroll it. "Hey, I'm gonna suit up and go see if captain Sofia needs a hand with the village defenses. Just chill out here for a while until one of the others gets back, I guess."

Carefully stepping backward into the chassis of his MAX suit, he deftly attached his torso armor and helmet before giving Juliet a quick wave. "Be back in a bit," he said, his voice slightly distorted by the buzz of his helmet's speakers. Double-checking the HUD projected on the inside of his helmet that everything was working, he headed for the cloth curtain door, pushing his way through. To his surprise, the young man who had been serving as the village elder's translator was standing outside, leaning up against the tunnel wall hardly a few feet away from the curtain. "Hey, what the hell? Were you eavesdropping?" Tony asked, an edge of anger in his voice.

The young man was quick to bow down in apology. "N-no, no, I was not! I was sent t-to retrieve you by the elder, and I heard you t-talking with the girl, and thought it would be rude to interrupt, yes?"

 _I'm not buying it,_  Tony thought, staring the young man down for any sign of weakness that might indicate a lie. "How much did you hear?"

"Y-you were asking her to make a p-promise, and I closed my ears! Like this!" The young man replied hastily, covering his ears with his hands in demonstration.

With one final glare, the Terran soldier finally relented. "Alright, I'm trusting you on that one. Anyway, where's your elder and captain Sofia?" he asked.

"This way!" The young man said, pointing up the sloped hallway toward what Tony assumed was the surface, far above the bottom of the deep pit. Nodding, he followed the young man out into the hallway.

A few minutes of silence passed. Tony could see something was bothering the young man, as he repeatedly balled and unballed his fists. "Excuse me, but… are you… close, with the girl?" He asked.

"Uhm… She's been through a lot, man, so I was just trying to help," Tony said. "Is there a problem?"

"I… I do not know… I was told to find one of your kind that was closest to her. There is something you must know, about her," the young man said, coming to a stop in the hallway. "She was not kidnapped. She was sold."

Tony's stomach dropped. "You're fucking kidding me, right? Tell me who."

The young man shook his head. "I was taught to be a translator by my father at a young age, who has since gone deaf and cannot work. I was there, at the dealing between the raiders and the old elder, and her father. She was sold in secret. It was arranged to look like a kidnapping, so that the other families would not kill the old elder in anger. It was no secret that the girl's father wanted a boy, to work in the mines, but the mother loved her. She found out and told the village."

"And her family?"

The translator shook his head. "The father killed the mother out of anger for… 'blowing the plan', I believe is the phrase you use. The old elder and the girl's father were exiled. The new elder, the old elder's son, sees the girl's return as… repentance? Yes, this is the word. Repentance for his father's wrongdoing. He wishes to find his father again, bring him back to the village. Please, meet with the elder."

The translator came to a stop in front of another curtained-off hallway, this time leading away from the center of the pit, deeper into what Tony guessed was a mineshaft. He reached for one of the curtains, holding it open as Tony stepped through. Inside, he found himself standing in a large stone room, dimly illuminated by orange-glowing glass bulbs on either side of the room and a pair of lanterns that hung from the ceiling. In the center of the room, the "elder" sat upon a simple iron chair, the armrests and seat lined with ancient wood and a worn sack-cloth cushion. As soon as the translator stepped into the room, the man upon the throne began to speak, making noises Tony didn't even think possible for the human mouth to create.

"He wishes to know your name, and what you and your… comrades? Yes, what they intend to do after leaving this village. I think he is wary of your ties with the Terrans."

 _I don't know what Sofia's told him already, but I don't think they'd take it nicely if I told them we're planning to go shake hands and get cozy with this rogue TR group like Sofia keeps thinking,_ Tony thought. After a moment's thought, he decided on his response: "My name's Tony. We plan to move on to other settlements. We're not from here, and we're looking to find a way home, I guess. Do you know if the TR here might have anything like, I dunno, a spaceship, or a teleporter?"

Although the translator gave him a perplexed look, the young man did his best to relay the message he had been given. "The elder does not know of what you are looking for," the translator said, speaking over the elder as the seated man grumbled. "He wishes that you might aid him in his search for his father as you travel. He has strong beliefs that, after his exile, he might have used his connections to ensure his safety among the Terrans, at an outpost in the Iron City."

"The Iron City?" Tony asked.

"It is a large settlement several day's walk from here. Only those with vehicles can reliably make the journey, due to the deserts and raider gangs who patrol the area. We deliver valuable ores in exchange for additional food and supplies. They, in turn, refine the ores and deliver them to the Terrans. They keep a large group of men inside the Iron City to keep the forges active in times of unrest."

"Right…" Tony sighed. "So you need us to drive over to this Iron City and see if your dad's still hanging around with the TR outpost, and then what?"

Another bout of conversation between the translator and the elder. "…And send him back here, if you are able," the translator said.

"And if he doesn't want to come back? I mean, you guys have it pretty hard here," Tony replied, looking around the room. "What if giving up whatever high-paying, cushy desk job the TR gave him is too much for him to give up, or if he's trapped in the job?"

"Then tell him that his son Rapheed misses him, and is doing the best he can to lead in his stead."

Tony nodded. "And what's the name of the guy we're looking for?"

"The old elder's name is Komali, although he may have changed his name. He looks just like his son," the translator said, nodding toward his leader. "That is all our elder has to say. The sun will fall within the hour. He recommends you get as much sleep as possible for the trip."

"Right," Tony said, nodding. To his right, he noticed that the frosted glass bulbs that had been glowing orange had started to fade. "I'll let my friends know about this and see what they have to say, so… I guess you'll hear from them in the morning."

The translator nodded. "Sleep well"


End file.
